Policy are much looser than it was before, so i'd reach to the lender and explain and see what options you have before putting the 'horse in front of carriage' type deal.its good to always be prepared but more information is needed if I can give more feedback (and possible others on this board),

He wants the option to build a carriage house out back and so I was going to set up a search filtered through zoning descriptions with a '1' attached to the last letter -- U-SU-C1, for example, or U-TU-B1.

The Seattle LoveNest houseboat (episode 1) and the Hudson river carriage house (episode 6) were my favorite! 

We applied and got the city to tear down the old carriage house garages and then graded and added a nice offstreet parking lot.

I am looking to buy a rental before the end of the year and am trying to decide if I should go after a single family home for around 100K (115- 95) (known as property "A" or get a single family home that has two units on it home with a carriage house around 200k (190 - 215( known as property "B").The "A" home would get around 1000 a month in rent and the "B" would get about 1800 together in rent.The "A" home is in a little worse area but is growing in popularity.

In my case the smaller house was considered a carriage house, and thus couldn't be split, but also couldn't count toward the appraisal.

It's a big front house (4 family) in the front and a carriage house (2 family) in the back.

The greencode of Buffalo indicates that I am in N-2R (Central Residential) zone of the city which affords me the opportunity to classify it under building types such as Attached House, Carriage House or Detached house. 

The other strategy we could do here is build a carriage house on the property which would add about another 2k in income a month.

The property contains one duplex and one (carriage house) in the backyard, which is essentially single family house the size of the duplex itself.