The Big Question

Municipalities Consider Ways to Restrain Ever-Expanding Houses

Call them mega-houses, mansions or McMansions. There's no question some people love them, but plenty of others hate them, and in nearly two dozen local communities, residents are using new planning tools to fight back against super-size structures.

Some, including Annapolis, College Park and Lewes, Del., are declaring neighborhoods historic districts or conservation areas. Others are enacting new rules protecting trees. Some, including Rehoboth Beach, Del., and Arlington County, have limited the size of individual houses. Fredericksburg is expected to do the same in the fall. Rockville is going to rewrite its entire zoning code. And 11 municipalities in Montgomery County, including Kensington, Somerset, Glen Echo, Garrett Park and the town of Chevy Chase, recently got permission from the state to set tighter limits of their own on construction, and in October, they will begin figuring out the details.

"People are taking traditional tools and tweaking them in a new way to permit residents to have a greater voice in the process," said Adrian Scott Fine, director of the Northeast field office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The land-use skirmishes here mirror what is happening elsewhere -- from Philadelphia to Palo Alto, Calif., from Dallas to Winnetka, Ill. "It's definitely occurring all around the country," said Paul DesJardin, chief of housing and planning for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

"Some of it is subjective," DesJardin said. "It's 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' versus 'you know it when you see it,' but that's why jurisdictions are handling it differently on a case-by-case basis."

Builders say the backlash has gone too far. "The concerns of existing homeowners have struck a chord with elected officials, and there's concern there's been an over-reaction," said Susan Matlick, executive vice president of the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association, a builders' trade group. Matlick said builders are erecting bigger houses in older neighborhoods because that is what owners want, that today's buyers want to be able to build or rebuild to reflect modern tastes -- which means more and larger rooms, more and larger bathrooms and kitchens and higher ceilings than older houses.

"These suburban houses were built as workforce housing, the way people lived in the 1940s and 1950s, and to modernize a house for the way families live today, it's got to be enlarged," said Richard Mandell, a partner in Sandy Springs Builders in Montgomery County.

A house with two bedrooms and one bath no longer has the appeal it once did, Mandell and other builders say. Moreover, some older houses are just plain ugly or are dilapidated beyond repair. Just because they are older doesn't mean they are better, they say.

But preservationists believe the influx of mega-houses is a real threat to neighborhoods. This summer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified 100 communities in 20 states as particularly at risk of losing their individual character. Among those in the Washington area were Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Garrett Park, Kensington and Somerset in suburban Maryland, the entire District of Columbia and parts of Alexandria, Arlington and Fairfax County in Northern Virginia.

"It's the greatest threat to the character of older neighborhoods since urban renewal and the construction of the interstate highway system 50 years ago," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust.

In the Washington area, the issue most often comes to a head when residents revolt against specific new houses they perceive as too big or out of character with the community. Instead of inciting envy among the neighbors with their beautifully appointed homes, the newcomers are provoking hostility.

In Fairfax County this summer, an angry homeowner in an established neighborhood took his complaint about the tall house being erected next door to planning officials, who found that hundreds of houses in the county were taller than allowed. The height limit in the county is 35 feet, but builders had gotten around the rule by building houses with several different roofs angling in different directions and then averaging their height. Builders say their plans were approved by the county. The county now says that more than a dozen home buyers must lower their roofs or raise the ground around the foundation to comply with the law.