Living larger and larger – New houses are twice as big as in the ’50s. Neat – till they build one next door.
SUPERSIZE fries, 64-ounce soft drinks, SUVs the size of small European principali-for liking things large. It only makes sense, then, that we’d have a fondness for big houses, too. And we do.
Although family size has been dwindling for decades, new homes have grown consistently bigger, coming in (according to 2004 data from the U.S. Census Bureau) at an average of 2,349 square feet per house. That’s almost 300 square feet more than in 1990 – and nearly double the typical 1950s home.
The trouble is when the new giant dwellings are wedged into blocks of smaller homes. These new, large luxury homes are derided as dull, yet ostentatious – “Faux Chateaux” – or criticized for failing to fit in with their surroundings.
With everyone trying to keep up with the Joneses, a several-thousand-square-foot pad no longer makes for a mansion: Instead, it makes for a McMansion.
The nickname alone speaks volumes – who would want to live in a house that calls to mind plastic foam containers and fried apple pies? And yet, there’s a reason buyers keep snapping them up.
McMansions are big, yes, but they also often come with amenities you wouldn’t find in older homes.
As Fred Cooper, senior vice president of finance for Toll Brothers, among the more prominent builders of such large, luxury homes, puts it, “What appeals to people is partly, obviously, the size, but also when people buy a new home, they get all the latest technologies and lifestyle features they wouldn’t get if they bought a 30- or 40-year-old home.”
The latest gimcracks include vaulted ceilings, extra fireplaces (sometimes one in the master bedroom), media rooms, guest suites, Jack-and-Jill bathroom sinks and ready-to-go wiring for all the latest technology.
As for the complaints about McMansions’ aesthetic crimes, Cooper shrugs it off as more or less a matter of individual taste.
“We build to the market; we don’t define the market,” he says. “And we’re building what our buyers want.”
In other words, that nouveau semi-riche home next door might not be Fallingwater, but not every buyer is interested in the architectural avant-garde.
BLOCK HEADS
Not everyone wants to live next door to a McMansion, either. It’s one thing when Faux Chateaux go up in subdivisions surrounded by similar spreads, but suddenly plopping down an enormous new house down on a street of established older structures is a sure-fire way to get the neighbors grumbling.
Take the recent case of a Mont-clair, N.J., neighborhood. Trouble began when Rica Enterprises, headed by developer Manny Rica of Kearny, built a new 3,300-square-foot home on a street of older houses roughly half that size. The house fully conformed to the town’s zoning regulations.
While Rica might have followed the letter of the law, the spirit, neighbors have suggested, is another matter. “The developer was just in there to get the money,” claims Elizabeth Thatcher, who lives next door to the 3,300-square-foot home. “He was just in there to make the house as big and as bad as possible. He just wanted to get the top dollar for it.
“The house looks nothing like anything else on our street. Nothing. It’s totally out of place. It’s hideous, and it’s massive.”
Neighbor Donna Minnicozzi agrees. “It’s this giant faux-brick, faux-stucco house, when almost all the homes here are Victorian or Colonial,” she says.
In addition to the house’s aesthetics, Minnicozzi (who, with her fiancé, Mike King, lives directly behind the building) also takes issue with its intrusiveness.
“We have 17 windows facing our house now,” she says. “It’s like always being under observation.”
Or, as professor Megan Laverty, another resident living in the new structure’s shadow, puts it, “It gives one the feeling that one is in their backyard. They’ve, in a sense, appropriated everyone else’s backyard as their own because of the size.”
As for developer Rica’s part in the affair, he says, “I go by the city codes. I build whatever the city code allows me to.”
Which King says is true. “The developer did everything legally, ethically,” he says. “But it’s like the old saying a just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean that you should.”
In Laverty’s opinion, the real issue isn’t so much the house as the regulations that allowed it.
“It’s not so much just that ‘here’s a big house and look how ugly it is,’ though, that is the final outcome. “It’s more,” she says, “about relationships between boards and communities and procedures.”
Given the rapid pace of development throughout the tristate area, these boards are often coming under increased pressure to act.
THE BOARD ROOM
According to Montclair Planning Technician Richard Charre-un, the town is pondering a number of regulation changes in response to concerns about the Rica house and others like it.
Already Montclair has passed a new height regulation limiting homes to 2 1/2stories. Also being tossed around are ideas like proportional footprint regulation (that a house’s maximum footprint must be a certain proportion of its lot size) and contextual zoning (that a house’s setbacks, height, etc., must be similar to that of the surrounding structures).
There’s also an idea called floor area ratios (FAR). Basically, a FAR regulates a house’s square footage in proportion to its lot size, so you can build out or up but not both.
Other parts of the tristate area have also introduced recent zoning changes in response to the influx of outsized homes. Most prominently, Bayside, Queens, rezoned several hundred of its blocks under New York City’s new R2A code, which significantly restricts the size of new houses.
Ten other Queens neighborhoods have also altered their regulations over the last three years.
It’s been a busy time for such changes, in part because of the fast pace of development in the area. Charreun notes more building is taking place “because of what the market is and what it’s been.”
And the more building, the more chance for conflict, particularly with many homebuyers indulging their recently acquired taste for McMansions, while others seek to preserve their older neighborhoods as they are.
“The issue is, how does the community communicate to the planning board its needs – so that the kinds of policies it is putting in place can be more effective, and more answerable, to the community’s needs,” Laverty says.
“I don’t think you’ll ever have zoning ordinances that will eliminate all the problems that people perceive with new buildings,” Charreun observes.
“But buildings are permanent, semipermanent – they’re going to be here for a while – so you really want to do the best you can to have them fit in as well as they can.”