Council Member Wants House Size Tied to Lot Size

Montgomery County Council member Roger Berliner said yesterday that he hopes to limit construction of single-family houses of the kind whose height and bulk have roiled the close-in Washington suburbs.

Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda), whose district has become ground zero for tear-downs and McMansions, plans to introduce a bill that would change the method of calculating maximum house size to take into account the size of the lot. The result could be marginally smaller houses, he said.

Under his proposal, which he began circulating to his colleagues late yesterday, the maximum size of a house on a 6,000-square-foot lot, a common size in his district, would be 4,750 square feet, down from the 5,150 currently allowed under local zoning.

"Some will say that is too big a bite; others will say we can do more," he said, as he explained the graduated system for determining a house's size based on the amount of land it occupies.

"All homes should be sized on the basis of the lot. Proportionality will now be our key principle going forward," he said.

Berliner also proposed requiring that neighbors be given additional notice of plans to build an "infill" house, even though there are few legal tools available to block such houses. He did not propose any new ways to resist infill development, but his proposal would require builders to examine neighborhood guidelines, which are usually nonbinding, in communities that have adopted them.

Berliner unveiled his plans after acknowledging that an "infill task force" he convened almost a year ago had been unable to reach agreement on how to balance neighborhood concerns about house size with the property rights of landowners.

Raquel Montenegro, a leading lobbyist for the building industry in Montgomery County, said she couldn't comment on Berliner's plan because she hadn't seen it. Montenegro and others in the building industry have expressed concerns recently that the task force might try to limit property rights in ways that would reduce property values.

Richard Mandell, founder of Sandy Spring Builders and a task force member, said the 11-member panel hadn't been able to agree on much. "I am not sure the actual problem was clearly enough defined to be able to come up with a definitive answer," he said.