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If you want access to housing news hot off the press from Ryan O'Connell...

...but you're tired of his clickbait thumbnails and videos of him with very mediocre audio quality – GIDDY UP! I HAVE GREAT NEWS FOR YOU!

Subscribe to this newsletter today, and you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available (which we will keep to a weekly basis unless there's something super time sensitive a handful of times a year).

Your subscription makes this newsletter possible, and allows Ryan O'Housing to put more time into it. Thank you!

More than just ADUs

This newsletter will have a lot more than ADU news in it.

It will have ALL the important housing news and housing-related news that I am fortunate enough to work on.

As much as I love Accessory Dwelling Units, they are just one of the many powerful tools we have in our toolbox.

And the truth is that I spend most of my time working on housing topics that go far beyond ADUs.

How To ADU™ offers me a lot of different channels to talk to California homeowners about ADUs, and I get to talk about them in different ways on YouTube, on TikTok, and inside the Facebook group...

...but we are also beginning to run into the limitations of each medium.

For example, the YouTube channel thrives when we produce fewer videos with more research and editing on themes that are broadly appealing to homeowners.

This is wonderful in terms of reaching new people and sharing vital information that will help them build homes.

However it means I have a major incentive to avoid doing long, wonky pieces on other important subjects like transit, homelessness, environmental urbanism, workforce development, economic equity, CDBG grants, social housing, and all the other stuff I'm working on.

In the early days, I could publish whatever I wanted to on those channels and it wouldn't be too disruptive to the overall business of How To ADU™ – but I also didn't know how I was going to pay my mortgage in those days!

Now, as the channels grow and evolve, I'm finding more and more of my drafts going unfilmed, unpublished and left behind.

That's a shame.

News vs entertainment

This newsletter will favor news over entertainment value.

It will be structured like this article.

Each article will be skimmable with easily digested headlines in bold.

There will generally be short sentences that give you the gist of the bold words.

And then longer more detailed paragraphs that dive into specific evidence or examples.

Keen observers will notice that this is different from the current video channels and Facebook group which all focus to some extent on the algorhithmic needs of the platforms (i.e. they are entertainment channels).

Here's a classic example. This YouTube video (the best-performing video I have ever published, at the time of writing this article) was originally going to be a video about ADU Condos. But while drafting titles and thumbnails and looking at the performance of other videos on the channel, it was clear that we should make it an update on all the new laws in 2024, featuring ADU condos as one of many laws, and promising a follow-up video on ADU condos. At the same time, I wanted to do videos about OTHER housing laws that passed in 2024. But previous video performance suggested that might NOT be a good idea for the channel.

A lot of these editorial decisions were based on wanting to reach the widest audience of homeowners with the most important information for their projects (which I still think is the admirable goal of How To ADU™!) But we were not basing all those editorial decisions on getting the news out.

With this newsletter, it will be about getting news out.

And you'll meet like-minded people...

By subscribing, you're joining a community of people who are a step beyond the ADU videos.

You don't want the carefully curated, broadly entertaining video topics.

You want the direct line into my brain.

Buckle up!