The Big Question
Municipalities Consider Ways to Restrain Ever-Expanding Houses

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 12, 2006

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.

In Lewes, a town founded by the Dutch in 1631, residents rose up after an old house on a historic street was torn down about five years ago and replaced with a large modern structure with a ground-level garage. Neighbors called it "the Snout House" because it reminded them of a pig's stubby nose. In December 2004, the city began requiring all new homes or significant additions in a 50-block radius to undergo review by the city's historic preservation committee. In the past 18 months, about 100 homes have come before the committee. A handful have been rejected outright.

New construction in that area is now pretty iffy, said Henry Baynum, building official for Lewes. "Normally you try to rebuild what you have there," he said.

Longtime Lewes resident Alan Keffer was skeptical at first. He has come to think, though, that the reviews are needed because so many home buyers seemed to be caught up in keeping up with, and surpassing, the Joneses.

"It's almost the same as when people stopped driving cars and had to outdo each other with SUVs," Keffer said. "It's like there is peer pressure in whatever their realm might be. They're doing things that are not really necessary for their lives. . . . The intention here is not to prevent people from modifying their homes but to keep the scale of the community and the street in the way that those of us living here expected it to remain."

Edward Barrows of Glen Echo Heights, a neighborhood in Montgomery County, has been horrified to see lots "scalped," with their leafy trees "scraped" away when new homes are built. Barrows, a professor of forest biology at Georgetown University, sees the problem as part of a global environmental crisis.

"I care about trees," Barrows said. "Trees are going down all over the planet."

But he feels powerless to do anything about it. Glen Echo Heights is in Bethesda, an unincorporated area that is governed by Montgomery County. "The law doesn't protect us," he complained. "There's almost nothing we can do because our representatives aren't protecting us."

Carolyn Shawaker, mayor of Garrett Park, shares his feelings of helplessness and blames it on what she sees as a pro-developer attitude among county planners. "That's made it harder for the little communities to do things to protect themselves," she said.

So Shawaker and other local leaders sought aid from Maryland Del. Richard S. Madaleno Jr., (D-Montgomery County), who sponsored a law that will permit about 11 communities in suburban Maryland to get more control of their zoning. He introduced the legislation after attending a Fourth of July picnic in the town of Chevy Chase, finding himself in a flood of 400 local residents walking around emblazoned with "Moratorium Now" stickers.

"People are almost exclusively opposed to how the new homes are changing the character of the neighborhood and their own lifestyles," Madaleno said. Still, he noted, once these small municipalities get the right to write their own new design guidelines Oct. 1, it is impossible to say exactly what they will do.

That's because many people remain conflicted about what is best, even in places such as Arlington that have long sought to control development. Mark Weinress, president of the Lyon Village Citizen's Association, which encompasses 800 houses in Arlington, said that while many people are saddened when a beautiful home is demolished, some ugly older homes seem to warrant that fate.

"Some houses that get torn down deserve it, but others are real losses," Weinress said.

In addition, he said, some of the new homes are well-designed and appropriate for their site. They have upgraded the neighborhood and increased property values.

But not everyone likes higher property values. "People who have stayed in a neighborhood and kept it stabilized can't afford to live there anymore ," said Michael Leventhal, Arlington's historic preservation program coordinator. "If three big McMansions come in, values go up, and so do your property taxes. It's an effect that's insidious. You don't notice it right away until you get your next tax bill."

And this revolt comes in the face of clear consumer preferences for ever-larger houses. In 1975, the average new house had 1,645 square feet of space, but the average new house in 2005 was considerably grander at 2,434 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

"Obviously the house sizes have gone up, and it's market demand," said Andy Rosenthal, president of Potomac-based Rosenthal Homes, who builds or remodels about seven custom houses a year. He said buyers now want a bedroom for each child, a guest room, several more bathrooms, a larger kitchen, large closets, one or two home offices, large dining rooms for family gatherings, spacious family rooms and 9-or 10-foot ceilings.

And they don't want to commute a long way to get that. Mark and Barbara Rabin, both in their mid-fifties, had been living in a large house in the outer suburbs but wanted to be closer to their jobs in Bethesda. Mark, a lawyer, and Barbara, an administrative assistant, bought a new house in Bethesda on a site that had previously housed a bungalow in very bad condition. An older house wouldn't do for them because they wanted modern heating and wiring. They also wanted a separate bedroom for each of their four college-age children, as well as enough space to entertain their extended family. They felt they needed a 5,000-square-foot house to meet their needs.

The 1,200-square-foot house that was on the site would have been way too small, Mark Rabin said. "We need much more space than that," he said.

Planning officials find themselves caught in the middle of the new zoning wars. Last year, Rehoboth Beach enacted a moratorium on larger new houses, then reduced how much could be constructed depending on the size of the lot. Some people had purchased lots intending to build larger homes, and the zoning limitation meant that some were unable to proceed. Now city leaders are wondering if some of those plans should be grandfathered under the previous zoning code.

"People were putting as much as they could on the property, and the houses were becoming immense," said David Murphy, building inspector for Rehoboth Beach. "But a lot of people still like the quaintness of single-story beach cottages. You can't satisfy everybody with these ordinances. Some will like them and some will not."

Ryan Flax, 32, and his wife Nikole, also 32, both lawyers, bought a 1,000-square-foot bungalow in Bethesda in 2002, but its small size has become an issue, particularly since the birth of baby Chloe eight months ago. They loved the neighborhood and didn't want to move, so they decided to tear down the house and build a new, 3,000-square-foot structure. But when Montgomery County changed its building standards last year, they had to scrap their plans and start from scratch, which Flax said has cost the family "thousands of dollars" and a year of delays.

"You have to lose the time, and start over," Flax said. "That caused the most pain."

The issue of big houses coming to town isn't controversial everywhere. Some people welcome new construction because it brings economic growth and think that change and modernization are inevitable.

"One guy's mansion is another man's neighborhood urban renewal," said builder Mandell.

And in other cities, the debate is muted because the jurisdictions took such strong enforcement actions in the past that little of that kind of construction occurs now. Annapolis first protected large tracts of land in its historic district, and then, starting in about 1990, it began creating special zoning "overlay" districts that further restricted development. Construction is also curtailed by state rules covering land within 1,000 feet of the Chesapeake Bay. About one-third of the city falls within that zone.

Then, last year, the city created a new zoning designation called "neighborhood conservation districts" for five areas, the former overlay zones, including Eastport, a smaller village over a bridge from the main city, the President's Hill neighborhood and the blocks around Clay Street. In May, the city announced a new initiative to both protect existing trees and increase the number of trees in Annapolis, which will make it even harder for builders to clear lots for big houses.

"The purpose is to afford neighbors the possibility to be heard on anything," said Dirk Geratz, senior planner for Annapolis. "I sense from other communities that it's hard for them to imagine getting similar zoning in their neighborhood. We started out simple, and the regulations developed over time. But it's been a solution to the mansionization problem."