Edina Legalized ADUs in 2024. The City's Own Numbers Explain Why So Few Exist.

In Edina, you can rent your accessory dwelling unit or you can rent your house. Not both, not at the same time, and not to two different tenants collecting two different checks. If you build a backyard cottage hoping it will help cover the mortgage while you still live in the main house, that plan runs straight into an ordinance that treats the property as one rental unit at a time, no matter how many kitchens are on the lot.

That single rule tells you almost everything about why Edina's ADU story has moved slower than the headlines suggested it would. The city council approved Ordinance No. 2024-02 on April 16, 2024, opening the door to accessory dwelling units on single-family lots across Edina. As of January 2026, twenty-one months later, the city had issued four ADU permits, with a fifth in the approval process. When Edina studied the question before writing the ordinance, staff looked at Portland, Oregon, the national leader in ADU adoption, where roughly 1.5 percent of eligible lots have built one. Applied to Edina's housing stock, that rate would produce a little over 200 ADUs spread across the city over many years. Five permits into the process, the city is a long way from that number, and the gap is not really about interest. A pre-ordinance survey of Edina residents found that 72 percent supported allowing ADUs in their neighborhood, and 40 percent said they would build one themselves if the rules allowed it. People want this. The lots and the rulebook are doing the limiting.

The Coverage Math Nobody Mentions at the Open House

Edina's zoning code caps how much of a lot can be covered by buildings, and the cap depends on lot size. Parcels of 9,000 square feet or more can cover up to 25 percent of the lot with structures. Anything smaller than 9,000 square feet is held to 30 percent, but with a hard ceiling of 2,250 square feet total, whichever number is lower.

That ceiling includes the house, the garage, and any other structure already standing. During the public hearing process on the ADU ordinance, one Edina property owner put the problem plainly, noting that on their lot, the 2,250-square-foot cap had "mostly been used up by the existing home" before an ADU ever entered the picture. On a typical inner-Edina lot with a house and a two-car garage already built out, there may be little or no coverage allowance left for a new detached structure, regardless of how much backyard is visible from the street.

This is the mechanism that separates the four permitted ADUs from the roughly 200 the city modeled. It is not that Edina residents changed their minds after 2024. It is that the ordinance made ADUs legal everywhere, but the coverage math only pencils out on a fraction of lots.

Seven Years on a Refrigerator

Andrew and Janelle Vick had been planning a separate structure on their Edina property since 2018. Andrew, a photographer, had rented studio space in St. Louis Park for more than twenty years and wanted a permanent space of his own, one where he could meet clients and edit photos without it sitting inside the family's living room. When the ordinance passed in April 2024, the Vicks celebrated a plan they had carried for six years. Andrew later described taping a picture of the project to the fridge and, on hard days, tapping it for encouragement.

Their home sits on the historic site of the old 44th Street trolley turnaround, and the design for the ADU shares a wall with their existing garage while remaining a fully separate structure, built to echo the character of that history rather than compete with it. It is the kind of project the ordinance was written to enable: thoughtful, integrated into the existing lot, respectful of what a detached garage in that part of Edina is supposed to look like. It is also a project that took the better part of a decade from idea to permit, which is a useful data point for anyone assuming an ADU is a fast add-on to a property they are considering.

What an Internal ADU Sidesteps

Not every project in Edina is fighting the coverage cap. Dario Jevtic, owner of Edina-based Adriatic Construction, is currently working on a home in the Braemar Hills area with an internal ADU, a unit built entirely within the existing footprint of the house rather than as a new structure in the yard. Because an internal ADU does not add new building coverage, it avoids the exact constraint that stalls detached projects on smaller lots. Jevtic has said the ordinance "opens up opportunities" for builders and that a well-integrated ADU is more likely to be used, maintained, and add value over time.

Chris Strom of Christopher Strom Architects, the architect who helped write Minneapolis's original ADU ordinance in 2014 and later consulted with Edina on its own 2024 rules, has said his firm gets multiple ADU inquiries every week. He has also pointed out that homeowners in the parts of Edina with larger, older lots are the ones most likely to find room for a detached unit, since square footage, not enthusiasm, is what determines feasibility. Strom estimates construction starts around $450 per square foot and typically climbs from there, which lines up with the city's own published range of $100,000 to $350,000 for a full ADU project, internal units landing on the low end and detached units on the high end.

The Rule That Changes the Return

Even on a lot with room to spare, Edina's rental structure limits what an ADU can actually earn for its owner. Either the main house or the ADU can be rented, not both, and whichever one is rented requires a rental license. Short-term rentals are prohibited outright in Edina regardless of ADU status, so a Braemar Hills carriage house or a converted Country Club basement is never going to become a weekend booking. For an owner who lives in the main house and hopes the ADU will generate steady income on the side, this works as intended. For an owner or investor imagining two rent checks from one lot, it does not.

That distinction matters most for the kind of buyer drawn to Edina in the first place. A family caring for an aging parent, a professional wanting a home office with its own entrance, or a homeowner planning ahead for a adult child who needs a semi-independent space is well served by the ordinance as written. A buyer evaluating a lot purely for rental yield should run the numbers on one unit, not two.

What to Check Before You Assume a Lot Works

If an Edina property has ADU potential on your mind, the ordinance being legal is the smallest part of the question. The lot itself decides the rest.

• Total lot square footage, and whether it clears the 9,000-square-foot threshold for the more generous 25 percent coverage allowance
• How much of the existing coverage cap the current house and garage have already used
• Where the garage sits relative to the rear property line, since detached ADUs must sit behind the rear building line and meet a 12-foot rear setback (5 feet where the lot abuts an alley)
• Whether the property's water and sewer service lines can support a shared connection to a second kitchen and bathroom, since Edina requires ADUs to share utility lines with the principal dwelling unless the Public Works Director approves an exception
• Whether there is genuine off-street parking capacity, given that Edina bans overnight street parking from November 1 through March 31 and requires any parked vehicle to sit on a hard surface

None of these questions show up on a listing sheet. They show up in a site visit and a conversation with the city's building inspections division, which is exactly the kind of groundwork worth doing before falling in love with a floor plan for a space that may not fit.

A Few Questions Worth Asking

Can an Edina ADU be used for short-term rental, like Airbnb? No. Short-term rentals are prohibited citywide in Edina, independent of ADU status.

Does building an ADU create a separate tax parcel or allow me to sell it separately? No. Edina's ordinance specifically bars ADUs from being sold independently of the principal dwelling or split into a separate tax parcel.

Is Edina's ADU size limit the same as Minneapolis or St. Paul? No. Edina caps ADUs at 1,000 square feet, with an exception for units built entirely within an existing basement. Minneapolis allows up to 1,300 to 1,600 square feet depending on lot size, and St. Paul caps at 800 square feet.

The ordinance did what it was supposed to do. It made a genuinely useful housing option legal in a city where it wasn't before. What it could not do is change lot sizes, rewrite the coverage math, or turn a small in-town parcel into a large one. If an ADU is part of why you're looking at a specific Edina address, the conversation worth having isn't whether it's allowed. It's whether that lot, with its existing house and garage already standing, has anything left to build with.

If you're weighing an Edina property with multigenerational living, a home studio, or long-term flexibility in mind, I'd rather walk the lot with you before you fall for the listing photos. Aaron Spiteri works this market every day and can tell you quickly whether a property's numbers actually support the plan you have in mind. Let's Connect.