Bigger Isn't Always Better

Communities across the U.S. are taking action against the supersize houses invading their front and backyards

Written by Peter Hellman

The big yellow Cat excavator rumbled up onto the lawn of the modest craftsman-era bungalow at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. At that hour, it would have been hard for protesting neighbors to reach city officials. Quickly, the excavator’s giant claw reduced the place to debris, making way for a far larger house with a double garage and a separate guest cottage. A neighbor says that the new owner, a single man, is friendly. But his overscale house is not friendly to the much smaller houses around it. It’s a suburban-style McMansion in the wrong place, which happens to be Candler Park, a graceful old neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia.

The problem of teardowns and their often supersize successors is besetting formerly harmonious neighborhoods such as Candler Park in cities nationwide. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Places identified 100 communities in 20 states that were experiencing teardown epidemics in historic communities. At the end of 2007, the tally had jumped to 478 communities in 40 states. Teardown hot spots include Dallas, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Denver, where “modest bungalows are being blown apart for poptops,” says Adrian Fine, the National Trust’s point person on teardowns, or what are called scrapeoffs in Denver.

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