Keeping a Close Eye On the Master Plan

Before Plunking Down a Deposit, Study Up on Maps and Zoning Rules -- And You May Still Get a Water Tower

Tom Norville thinks he did his "due diligence" before signing a contract a year ago for a new home in Dominion Valley, a gated golf-course community on Route 15 outside Haymarket.

He studied the builder's maps, plans and scale model and looked at a master plan from the Prince William County planning and zoning office.

Still, Norville says he never guessed that a water tower shown on the model as a tiny plastic ball on a tee would turn out to be the massive tank towering behind expensive homes finished this spring. Some neighbors say the tank -- light blue and about 120 feet tall -- looks like a giant spaceship. Norville, who lives around the corner from the tank, also says he had no idea that a 13,000-square-foot fire station is planned even closer to his back yard.

The situation in Dominion Valley is contentious, and there is plenty of disagreement over what was disclosed and when. Toll Brothers, the builder, says residents in the community of $700,000-plus homes got the proper disclosure information and that adjacent owners got price breaks. The local member of the Board of Supervisors agrees with the builder.

But this is not the only master-planned community with disagreements over what was done or said and when it was done or said. The highest-profile dispute locally is over Clarksburg Town Center, a planned community northeast of Germantown off Interstate 270 in Montgomery County, where residents have complained that the area is not being built as promised, leaving them with inadequate parkland, narrow streets and homes that are too close together and too tall.

These controversies may take years to resolve. But they illustrate just how big an effect the arcane details of community plans can have on individual home buyers.

It might not be possible to eliminate all unpleasant surprises -- for instance, in Clarksburg, residents claim that the problem is that plans weren't followed. But real estate experts say buyers may avoid shocks if they closely examine the local land-use plan, keep up with plan amendments and development proposals, talk with longtime residents or homeowner groups, and pay attention to what is actually being built.

Even in established neighborhoods, long-dormant projects can spring to life, as the intercounty connector in Montgomery County appears to have done. And in many older neighborhoods, existing houses are smaller than the zoning allows -- so a new supersized house can be out of scale with its neighbors but still within the rules.

But few homeowners or buyers keep track of all those complex legal details, say the experts.

"Typically people don't do that," says Marya Morris, a senior research associate at the national office of the American Planning Association in Chicago. "Typically what happens is people buy a house on the edge of a metropolitan area and next to a nice grove of trees, and they wake up one Saturday morning and see a backhoe in there and find out that 300 homes are going in behind them."

But Morris said, "It's their responsibility to take a look at the plan, or more important, to go the zoning administrator and ask what could potentially happen, whether it's a public facility that could go in or a large housing development that could affect their school enrollments or the traffic."

She added, "It's especially important if they live next to a piece of vacant land."