Bigger Isn't Always Better (continued)
Communities across the U.S. are taking action against the supersize houses invading their front and backyards
What’s a poptop? “They’ll pull the roof off a bungalow, and pop a whole new floor or two on top, maybe Tuscan revival style,” says Fine. That all but guarantees long shadows in the neighbors’ yards. In Atlanta, the teardown pace has been so frenetic in the last few years that city council activist Mary Norwood called it “the second burning of Atlanta.”
The good news is that grassroots anti- McMansionists are fighting back. Often, they’re out ahead of local government when it comes to preserving the character of their communities. In the architecturally rich, fully built-out Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, for example, village officials did nothing as more than a dozen Victorian and Prairie-style homes were demolished to make way for McMansions. “A bunch of us residents decided we wanted our officials to get more involved in the loss of these significant older homes,” says longtime village resident Jackie Bossu. “But their response was that they couldn’t do anything so long as our 1969 zoning law wasn’t being violated. They were just running on autopilot.”
Kenilworth’s outdated zoning code actually encouraged teardowns because, as Bossu explains, wraparound porches, covered entries and deep bay windows—all common features of the original homes—were counted as permitted interior square footage under FAR (floor area ratio) regulations.
Historic homes in desirable neighborhoods like this one in Denver, Colo., are teardown targets.
Builders realized that they could eliminate those features to create homes with maximum bulk. The result, says Bossu, was that teardowns were replaced with “boxy houses, marketed on square footage.” In 2006, Kenilworth found itself on the National Trust’s list of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.
Responding to rising citizen dismay, the village’s building review committee called a meeting on teardowns in late 2003. “It was a weekday evening, but more than 200 residents showed up, even though we have only 830 homes,” Bossu says. Belatedly, regulations were adapted to the new speculative realities, including a required “cooling-off period” for teardown permits. FAR computations were also changed to benefit existing homes rather than new construction, so owners have less temptation to sell out. And so-called snout garages, which protrude from facades of new homes (sometimes called Garage Mahals), were banned. This year, Kenilworth expects to have a revised code that is tilted toward preservation of the village’s traditional fabric rather than teardowns.
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