From The New York Times
Living Larger, and Drawing Fire
By Dan Zegart
05/20/07
Like the many Eskimo words for snow, a multitude of nicknames exist for the oversize houses commonly referred to as McMansions, and they mirror the uneasiness over the spread of the homes.
“You hear them called starter castles, beltway baronials, mini Taj Mahals, but my favorite is parachute homes, because of the disregard for local styles — like they were dropped from the sky,” said Edward J. Trawinski, a lawyer and land-use expert from Morristown, N.J.
Although the names may be amusing, many owners of smaller homes, especially in older communities dominated by more traditional architecture, find it anything but funny when one goes up in their neighborhood. With the proliferation of mammoth residences throughout the suburbs of New York City and beyond, some towns are trying to restrict the size and, sometimes, the look of new homes.
Mr. Trawinski has helped municipalities in northern New Jersey, including Wayne, Montclair and Bergenfield, write such laws, which commonly set maximums for height and square footage on a sliding scale that varies with the lot size. The laws may also dictate the slope of roofs and require side yards to be large enough so the new home does not loom over its neighbors.
Such laws draw sharp dividing lines between some residents and builders. The debate is particularly fierce in towns like Westport, Conn., where builders say smallish lots and high land values make tearing down existing homes and replacing them, often with much larger houses, necessary to provide a reasonable profit.
“I live with these regulations all the time, and they’re so complicated and so hard to understand,” said Rick Benson, a Westport resident and builder. “And now they’re not only getting more complicated, they’re actually regulating taste.” He estimated that he had six houses in various stages of completion; two of them were teardowns. All will be much bigger than those they replaced.
Mr. Benson said builders respond to market demands and contended that Westport’s standards for size were arbitrary. “I just did a 13,000-square-foot house on six to nine acres smack in the middle of town,” he said. “It’s massive. It looks like a hotel in the Adirondacks. Not a peep about that one.”
But the issue of large new houses is so contentious, said Gordon Joseloff, Westport’s first selectman, that two previous efforts to pass a home-size ordinance in Westport were voted down. “The attitude of a lot of people here is, ‘You’re messing with my nest egg,’ ” he said.
The Town of New Castle, N.Y., is grappling with a similar problem as it pushes ahead with a new law based on floor-area ratio that adjusts the allowable size of a house depending on the lot size. It is an approach sanctioned by courts in several states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and is based on what Mr. Trawinski called a recognition “that it’s not size per se but the perception of size.”
“A big house on a little postage stamp of land just looks terrible,” he said.
But the main goal of such ordinances is not to mandate smaller homes, but to preserve a community’s “streetscape” by preventing houses that are so much larger than the prevailing architecture as to be jarring, said Virginia Kurshan, chairwoman of the Maplewood, N.J., Historic Preservation Commission.
At one extreme, she said, nearby Glen Ridge declared the entire borough a historic district, putting tight restrictions on any building allowed. Maplewood, she said, is considering a less drastic law that might apply to new construction and additions.
Like Maplewood, New Castle has little undeveloped land left, said Frank Annunziata, the town engineer. “Like a lot of towns that are almost completely built out, we’re worried about older, maybe historic houses being knocked down and replaced with something that’s inappropriate and much bigger,” he said. Proposed zoning changes would permit a house of up to 10,391 square feet on four acres; quarter-acre lots would be capped at 4,100 square feet.
Aesthetics are less of a factor in Sagaponack, near East Hampton, on Long Island, with its expanses of open acreage. Nevertheless, critics have little trouble finding examples for their cause in this newly created village, which is writing its first zoning ordinance.
There is the 66,000-square-foot mansion on 63 beachfront acres, for example, or the structure called “the Great Wall of Sagaponack,” a sprawling residence protected by a wall more than 100 feet long and 20 feet high.
“We have generally large lots, most at least three acres, but there’s still concern over really large houses,” Mayor Bill Tillotson of Sagaponack said. “They still stick out.”
Builders argue that large-scale homes are an inevitable result of skyrocketing land values and changes in home-buying habits.
“You never used to have 9-, 10-foot ceilings with cathedral space,” said Stuart R. Koenig, a lawyer and land-use consultant to the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, who estimates that half of New Jersey’s towns have tried to regulate housing size. “And once you do that, if you want to still have living area, you need a bigger building.”
Mr. Benson, the Westport builder, also said that modern tastes dictate larger houses. “Older houses have low ceilings and out-of-date kitchens,” he said. “People don’t want to live in houses built in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. So they tear them down.”
Mr. Benson said he finds ordinances restricting large houses infuriating because they take aim at a problem that is disappearing on its own. “We’ve had three years of an economic slowdown, and market conditions and energy costs are causing builders to build smaller houses,” he said.
As an example, he cited two houses he built on adjoining lots in Westport: one a 6,500-square-foot home on one and a half acres, which was purchased well before completion, the second a 9,600-square-foot residence on two acres, which took two years to sell.
“I had to keep dropping the price,” he said. “It was just too big.”
[UPDATE, ADDED 5/25/07]
From The New York Times
Views Clash Among Neighbors As Builders Destroy Old for New
By Paul Vitello
04/23/07
MASSAPEQUA, N.Y. — With the chain saw man working from above and the wood chipper man working from below, removing one of the last trees on the newly cleared lot at Bay Drive and Nassau Street here took all of an hour the other day. The 75-year-old, 100-foot cedar came down in 6-foot chunks that made a slight tremor underfoot when they hit the ground.
“There used to be a charming little house here on a heavily wooded lot, with pepperidge and cedar and some beech trees,” said Kevin Kobs, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who stopped to watch the last stages of the clearing and grading of a lot bought by a home builder last year. “They tore down the house, ripped out the trees, and now they’re going to put up one of these, these ...”
He grasped for the word, then pointed down the street at the plywood frame of a vast, rectangular house with big picture windows under construction. “These monstrosities,” Mr. Kobs said as sawdust fell on him like a light spring snow.
Although there are signs that things may be starting to change, for most of the last decade older suburban neighborhoods like Mr. Kobs’s, an enclave called Harbour Green built on the South Shore of Long Island in the 1930s, have undergone a building boom that has divided communities.
On one side are longtime residents who value amenities like old trees, old homes, wide lawns and the intangible qualities referred to as scale and neighborhood character; on the other side are relative newcomers who might share those values in principle but who prefer to tear down the old houses and replace them with ones sometimes twice as big.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group based in Washington, produced a survey last year indicating fierce conflicts about teardowns, as they are called by opponents — or new construction on existing lots, as home builders call the phenomenon — from Montclair, N.J., Delray Beach, Fla., and the Hamptons of Long Island to Atlanta, Austin, Tex., and suburban communities outside Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Boston.
“It’s a huge phenomenon, and a very large concern of ours,” Richard Moe, president of the organization, said in an interview. “In the last several decades, the average size of the American home has doubled. When you inject these super-sized mansions into communities built according to an older standard, it can create enormous damage to the character of a place.”
But there are signs of an emerging shift in this culture war of architectural taste.
Partly as a result of the slowdown in home buying in some areas of the country, and partly because of a long-term effort by preservationists to enlist the help of local governments, a small but growing number of municipalities have imposed building moratoriums in the last two years.
In 2005, the town council in Chevy Chase, Md., passed a six-month building moratorium while it reviewed and tightened its zoning laws in response to a protest against the construction of McMansions; the following year the Maryland Legislature adopted a bill, which was signed into law, granting broader powers to local governments to limit how high, how wide and how big in relation to surrounding homes, new houses could be.
Similar moratoriums and zoning restrictions were adopted last year in municipalities large and small — including Austin, Tex., Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Ocean City, N.J., Larchmont and Brighton, N.Y., and the Chicago suburbs of Evanston, Oak Park, and Naperville.
“To us, we see it as a conflict between two groups that are basically well-intentioned,” said Stephen Melman, director of research and economic forecasting for the National Association of Home Builders, a Washington-based industry lobby. “You start with a desirable neighborhood, usually in a close-in suburb where the homes are older, and because it is such a nice place to live, it attracts your more selective clientele, who are looking for a higher-quality home.”
The home builders association estimates there were 330,000 home demolitions in the country last year, although that includes every category, from teardowns of the Harbour Green kind to those made necessary by damage and disrepair.
Mr. Melman said the total was about 20 percent lower last year than in 2005, the peak year of the boom in new housing. Still, he said it was impossible to know whether that was because of building moratoriums or the general decline in new housing construction.
By Long Island standards, the old houses in Mr. Kobs’s neighborhood, like the one just demolished along with the cedar tree, are very old. Pre-Levittown old.
The original 400 houses in this canal-fingered waterfront area were built from 1931 to 1940, and were among the first of their kind for middle-class homebuyers.
With their screened-in porches, fireplaces and steeply pitched gable roofs, Harbour Green homes were featured in magazines like “Life” and “Better Homes and Gardens” as encouraging examples of how far $4,500 could take the average person toward realizing the American Dream, a term that was then newly minted. By now, many of the original houses have been added to and renovated, but most retain the ivy-covered and tree-shaded look of the cottages they were designed to be.
It was about five years ago when the first of about two dozen homes here were torn down, neighbors say. In most cases, builders bought single-story houses with about 2,400 square feet of space for $600,000 to $800,000. They tore them down and built larger homes with two stories and 4,000 to 6,000 square feet of space that sold for more than $1 million.
Besides their size, a feature that stirred almost equal chagrin among neighbors was their height: to give the houses full-size basements on land so close to the water, builders heaped soil on the lots to raise the height of the foundation. That practice made the two-story houses seem to tower over the others, some neighbors said.
Dan Ryan, manager of a Prudential Douglas Elliman real estate agency in Massapequa, which has been a partner in some of the new building, said it was a matter of giving customers what they wanted.
“Buyers today want extra master bedrooms,” Mr. Ryan said. “They want dens. They want two-car garages. They want saunas. Is it the builder’s fault that he builds them bigger because someone wants to buy it that way?”
Beginning several years ago, Mr. Kobs, a business manager for an investment banking firm, and a nucleus of several activists including Robert Salamack, a Wall Street trader, and Mark Snider, who owns a local advertising company, convened a series of meetings among Harbour Green residents to discuss the changes in their neighborhood. They arranged meetings with Mr. Ryan, the real estate broker.
They called on their town councilman and on Jack Libert, a Long Island real estate lawyer who is also commissioner of planning and development in the Town of Oyster Bay, where Harbour Green is situated.
By their account, the talks were sporadic and inconclusive until early this year, when Mr. Ryan and Mr. Libert indicated some willingness to consider their concerns. In the meantime, two things happened that may have favored the group. The real estate market slowed enough that in Harbour Green, no fewer than four new homes built by developers — all larger than the cottages they replaced — have gone unsold for six months to a year.
The other factor came from the community of Oyster Bay, a hamlet on the North Shore. Last year, activists there won the support of town officials in efforts to stop the demolition of late 19th-century and early 20th-century homes. A yearlong moratorium, which ended in January, was put in effect while the town reconsidered the rules of new construction.
“We recognize that this is a problem in Harbour Green,” Mr. Libert said. “These squarish boxes seem to be overbuilt in relation to their neighbors.”
Mary Korber, who lives in one of the larger new houses in Harbour Green, answered her door the other day with a phone at her ear. A furniture store had failed to deliver one piece of new den furniture. Her house, on a raised foundation, has two stories, five bedrooms and a total 6,200 feet of space on a lot that once held a modest three-bedroom ranch.
“I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Korber said, a hand resting on the head of one of her four children, Collin, 5. “We moved here because we loved the charm of the neighborhood. I know people think our house is too big, but we thought it fit in. On the other hand, the land here is very expensive, and people who come here are not first-time homebuyers. They want a little more room. They have a lot of stuff.”
Her phone rang a lot: The furniture store calling back. A brother who lives in a house nearby. A friend down the street.
“But I have to tell you, that house where they were taking down that tree the other day,” she said. As it turned out, she had driven by at the same time that Mr. Kobs was watching the removal of the cedar tree at Bay Drive and Nassau Street.
“That was one of my favorite houses,” she said. “It was horrible when they knocked that down.”
Living Larger, and Drawing Fire
By Dan Zegart
05/20/07
Like the many Eskimo words for snow, a multitude of nicknames exist for the oversize houses commonly referred to as McMansions, and they mirror the uneasiness over the spread of the homes.
“You hear them called starter castles, beltway baronials, mini Taj Mahals, but my favorite is parachute homes, because of the disregard for local styles — like they were dropped from the sky,” said Edward J. Trawinski, a lawyer and land-use expert from Morristown, N.J.
Although the names may be amusing, many owners of smaller homes, especially in older communities dominated by more traditional architecture, find it anything but funny when one goes up in their neighborhood. With the proliferation of mammoth residences throughout the suburbs of New York City and beyond, some towns are trying to restrict the size and, sometimes, the look of new homes.
Mr. Trawinski has helped municipalities in northern New Jersey, including Wayne, Montclair and Bergenfield, write such laws, which commonly set maximums for height and square footage on a sliding scale that varies with the lot size. The laws may also dictate the slope of roofs and require side yards to be large enough so the new home does not loom over its neighbors.
Such laws draw sharp dividing lines between some residents and builders. The debate is particularly fierce in towns like Westport, Conn., where builders say smallish lots and high land values make tearing down existing homes and replacing them, often with much larger houses, necessary to provide a reasonable profit.
“I live with these regulations all the time, and they’re so complicated and so hard to understand,” said Rick Benson, a Westport resident and builder. “And now they’re not only getting more complicated, they’re actually regulating taste.” He estimated that he had six houses in various stages of completion; two of them were teardowns. All will be much bigger than those they replaced.
Mr. Benson said builders respond to market demands and contended that Westport’s standards for size were arbitrary. “I just did a 13,000-square-foot house on six to nine acres smack in the middle of town,” he said. “It’s massive. It looks like a hotel in the Adirondacks. Not a peep about that one.”
But the issue of large new houses is so contentious, said Gordon Joseloff, Westport’s first selectman, that two previous efforts to pass a home-size ordinance in Westport were voted down. “The attitude of a lot of people here is, ‘You’re messing with my nest egg,’ ” he said.
The Town of New Castle, N.Y., is grappling with a similar problem as it pushes ahead with a new law based on floor-area ratio that adjusts the allowable size of a house depending on the lot size. It is an approach sanctioned by courts in several states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and is based on what Mr. Trawinski called a recognition “that it’s not size per se but the perception of size.”
“A big house on a little postage stamp of land just looks terrible,” he said.
But the main goal of such ordinances is not to mandate smaller homes, but to preserve a community’s “streetscape” by preventing houses that are so much larger than the prevailing architecture as to be jarring, said Virginia Kurshan, chairwoman of the Maplewood, N.J., Historic Preservation Commission.
At one extreme, she said, nearby Glen Ridge declared the entire borough a historic district, putting tight restrictions on any building allowed. Maplewood, she said, is considering a less drastic law that might apply to new construction and additions.
Like Maplewood, New Castle has little undeveloped land left, said Frank Annunziata, the town engineer. “Like a lot of towns that are almost completely built out, we’re worried about older, maybe historic houses being knocked down and replaced with something that’s inappropriate and much bigger,” he said. Proposed zoning changes would permit a house of up to 10,391 square feet on four acres; quarter-acre lots would be capped at 4,100 square feet.
Aesthetics are less of a factor in Sagaponack, near East Hampton, on Long Island, with its expanses of open acreage. Nevertheless, critics have little trouble finding examples for their cause in this newly created village, which is writing its first zoning ordinance.
There is the 66,000-square-foot mansion on 63 beachfront acres, for example, or the structure called “the Great Wall of Sagaponack,” a sprawling residence protected by a wall more than 100 feet long and 20 feet high.
“We have generally large lots, most at least three acres, but there’s still concern over really large houses,” Mayor Bill Tillotson of Sagaponack said. “They still stick out.”
Builders argue that large-scale homes are an inevitable result of skyrocketing land values and changes in home-buying habits.
“You never used to have 9-, 10-foot ceilings with cathedral space,” said Stuart R. Koenig, a lawyer and land-use consultant to the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, who estimates that half of New Jersey’s towns have tried to regulate housing size. “And once you do that, if you want to still have living area, you need a bigger building.”
Mr. Benson, the Westport builder, also said that modern tastes dictate larger houses. “Older houses have low ceilings and out-of-date kitchens,” he said. “People don’t want to live in houses built in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. So they tear them down.”
Mr. Benson said he finds ordinances restricting large houses infuriating because they take aim at a problem that is disappearing on its own. “We’ve had three years of an economic slowdown, and market conditions and energy costs are causing builders to build smaller houses,” he said.
As an example, he cited two houses he built on adjoining lots in Westport: one a 6,500-square-foot home on one and a half acres, which was purchased well before completion, the second a 9,600-square-foot residence on two acres, which took two years to sell.
“I had to keep dropping the price,” he said. “It was just too big.”
[UPDATE, ADDED 5/25/07]
From The New York Times
Views Clash Among Neighbors As Builders Destroy Old for New
By Paul Vitello
04/23/07
MASSAPEQUA, N.Y. — With the chain saw man working from above and the wood chipper man working from below, removing one of the last trees on the newly cleared lot at Bay Drive and Nassau Street here took all of an hour the other day. The 75-year-old, 100-foot cedar came down in 6-foot chunks that made a slight tremor underfoot when they hit the ground.
“There used to be a charming little house here on a heavily wooded lot, with pepperidge and cedar and some beech trees,” said Kevin Kobs, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who stopped to watch the last stages of the clearing and grading of a lot bought by a home builder last year. “They tore down the house, ripped out the trees, and now they’re going to put up one of these, these ...”
He grasped for the word, then pointed down the street at the plywood frame of a vast, rectangular house with big picture windows under construction. “These monstrosities,” Mr. Kobs said as sawdust fell on him like a light spring snow.
Although there are signs that things may be starting to change, for most of the last decade older suburban neighborhoods like Mr. Kobs’s, an enclave called Harbour Green built on the South Shore of Long Island in the 1930s, have undergone a building boom that has divided communities.
On one side are longtime residents who value amenities like old trees, old homes, wide lawns and the intangible qualities referred to as scale and neighborhood character; on the other side are relative newcomers who might share those values in principle but who prefer to tear down the old houses and replace them with ones sometimes twice as big.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit group based in Washington, produced a survey last year indicating fierce conflicts about teardowns, as they are called by opponents — or new construction on existing lots, as home builders call the phenomenon — from Montclair, N.J., Delray Beach, Fla., and the Hamptons of Long Island to Atlanta, Austin, Tex., and suburban communities outside Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Boston.
“It’s a huge phenomenon, and a very large concern of ours,” Richard Moe, president of the organization, said in an interview. “In the last several decades, the average size of the American home has doubled. When you inject these super-sized mansions into communities built according to an older standard, it can create enormous damage to the character of a place.”
But there are signs of an emerging shift in this culture war of architectural taste.
Partly as a result of the slowdown in home buying in some areas of the country, and partly because of a long-term effort by preservationists to enlist the help of local governments, a small but growing number of municipalities have imposed building moratoriums in the last two years.
In 2005, the town council in Chevy Chase, Md., passed a six-month building moratorium while it reviewed and tightened its zoning laws in response to a protest against the construction of McMansions; the following year the Maryland Legislature adopted a bill, which was signed into law, granting broader powers to local governments to limit how high, how wide and how big in relation to surrounding homes, new houses could be.
Similar moratoriums and zoning restrictions were adopted last year in municipalities large and small — including Austin, Tex., Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Ocean City, N.J., Larchmont and Brighton, N.Y., and the Chicago suburbs of Evanston, Oak Park, and Naperville.
“To us, we see it as a conflict between two groups that are basically well-intentioned,” said Stephen Melman, director of research and economic forecasting for the National Association of Home Builders, a Washington-based industry lobby. “You start with a desirable neighborhood, usually in a close-in suburb where the homes are older, and because it is such a nice place to live, it attracts your more selective clientele, who are looking for a higher-quality home.”
The home builders association estimates there were 330,000 home demolitions in the country last year, although that includes every category, from teardowns of the Harbour Green kind to those made necessary by damage and disrepair.
Mr. Melman said the total was about 20 percent lower last year than in 2005, the peak year of the boom in new housing. Still, he said it was impossible to know whether that was because of building moratoriums or the general decline in new housing construction.
By Long Island standards, the old houses in Mr. Kobs’s neighborhood, like the one just demolished along with the cedar tree, are very old. Pre-Levittown old.
The original 400 houses in this canal-fingered waterfront area were built from 1931 to 1940, and were among the first of their kind for middle-class homebuyers.
With their screened-in porches, fireplaces and steeply pitched gable roofs, Harbour Green homes were featured in magazines like “Life” and “Better Homes and Gardens” as encouraging examples of how far $4,500 could take the average person toward realizing the American Dream, a term that was then newly minted. By now, many of the original houses have been added to and renovated, but most retain the ivy-covered and tree-shaded look of the cottages they were designed to be.
It was about five years ago when the first of about two dozen homes here were torn down, neighbors say. In most cases, builders bought single-story houses with about 2,400 square feet of space for $600,000 to $800,000. They tore them down and built larger homes with two stories and 4,000 to 6,000 square feet of space that sold for more than $1 million.
Besides their size, a feature that stirred almost equal chagrin among neighbors was their height: to give the houses full-size basements on land so close to the water, builders heaped soil on the lots to raise the height of the foundation. That practice made the two-story houses seem to tower over the others, some neighbors said.
Dan Ryan, manager of a Prudential Douglas Elliman real estate agency in Massapequa, which has been a partner in some of the new building, said it was a matter of giving customers what they wanted.
“Buyers today want extra master bedrooms,” Mr. Ryan said. “They want dens. They want two-car garages. They want saunas. Is it the builder’s fault that he builds them bigger because someone wants to buy it that way?”
Beginning several years ago, Mr. Kobs, a business manager for an investment banking firm, and a nucleus of several activists including Robert Salamack, a Wall Street trader, and Mark Snider, who owns a local advertising company, convened a series of meetings among Harbour Green residents to discuss the changes in their neighborhood. They arranged meetings with Mr. Ryan, the real estate broker.
They called on their town councilman and on Jack Libert, a Long Island real estate lawyer who is also commissioner of planning and development in the Town of Oyster Bay, where Harbour Green is situated.
By their account, the talks were sporadic and inconclusive until early this year, when Mr. Ryan and Mr. Libert indicated some willingness to consider their concerns. In the meantime, two things happened that may have favored the group. The real estate market slowed enough that in Harbour Green, no fewer than four new homes built by developers — all larger than the cottages they replaced — have gone unsold for six months to a year.
The other factor came from the community of Oyster Bay, a hamlet on the North Shore. Last year, activists there won the support of town officials in efforts to stop the demolition of late 19th-century and early 20th-century homes. A yearlong moratorium, which ended in January, was put in effect while the town reconsidered the rules of new construction.
“We recognize that this is a problem in Harbour Green,” Mr. Libert said. “These squarish boxes seem to be overbuilt in relation to their neighbors.”
Mary Korber, who lives in one of the larger new houses in Harbour Green, answered her door the other day with a phone at her ear. A furniture store had failed to deliver one piece of new den furniture. Her house, on a raised foundation, has two stories, five bedrooms and a total 6,200 feet of space on a lot that once held a modest three-bedroom ranch.
“I have mixed feelings,” Ms. Korber said, a hand resting on the head of one of her four children, Collin, 5. “We moved here because we loved the charm of the neighborhood. I know people think our house is too big, but we thought it fit in. On the other hand, the land here is very expensive, and people who come here are not first-time homebuyers. They want a little more room. They have a lot of stuff.”
Her phone rang a lot: The furniture store calling back. A brother who lives in a house nearby. A friend down the street.
“But I have to tell you, that house where they were taking down that tree the other day,” she said. As it turned out, she had driven by at the same time that Mr. Kobs was watching the removal of the cedar tree at Bay Drive and Nassau Street.
“That was one of my favorite houses,” she said. “It was horrible when they knocked that down.”
