A while back I posted about the building moratorium in Chevy Chase, MD, and the issue of “mansionization.” Well, fortunately the moratorium didn’t affect the building of our house, because we were already well into construction when the moratorium passed, but it’s still a hotly debated issue. In some neighborhoods (not ours) people are getting more vocal in their opposition to the razing or renovation of old houses and the building of new ones.
When a so-called McMansion threatens to cast its shadow on an undersized neighborhood, the fight that follows is usually about aesthetics and economics.
But in a neighborhood dispute in Montgomery County, it has become a battle over lawn signs and First Amendment rights to free expression.
It was bad enough, Nancy McCloskey said, when Montgomery officials approved plans for a six-bedroom, five-bathroom, 5,000-square-foot house on Overbrook Road in Brookdale, a Chevy Chase area neighborhood where most homes are about half to two-thirds that size.
Now, the agency that permitted the house has ordered McCloskey and other neighbors to remove lawn signs they planted in opposition to Thomas R. Eldridge’s plans for his lot.“It just makes me mad,” McCloskey said. “The same people who allow this oversized house in our neighborhood tell me I can’t put up signs in protest.”
The dispute has attracted the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has written to the county that the sign ordinance is unconstitutional.
Fortunately, no signs have appeared in our neighborhood, and the neighbors seem to be happy to see us building and moving into the neighborhood. Maybe that’s because most of the houses in our neighborhood have already been replaced or renovated. I don’t think the houses that predominated in our neighborhood before are the ones that people are fired up to preserve. If the one previously on our lot is any indication, they aren’t houses that most people shopping for homes would want to live in today, and renovating them.
According to our neighbors, the houses in that neighborhood were built in the 1950′s, inside of two weeks, using 1×4′s instead of 2×4′s. If they were anything like the one on our lot, they usually had two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a living room, and no basement. I don’t know if that’s what suited families’ needs back in the 50s, but it wouldn’t have worked for us. Still, there are a few left in the neighborhood, and even one of them is being expanded by the owner.
Of course, the house — or “McMansion” — mentioned in the article is a couple thousand square feet bigger than the one we’re building.
Earlier this year, a limited-liability corporation headed by Eldridge bought a 2,000-square-foot house on Overbrook Drive for $630,00. Despite community opposition, the corporation received a permit in July to raze the house and replace it with one much larger.
“The house itself had a lot of problems,” Eldridge said. “I think in close-in development, replacing older houses that have outlived their useful life is sound public policy.”
Residents don’t dispute that the house — which had served as a rental unit for decades — needed to be renovated or replaced.But they say they never envisioned someone replacing it with one so big, even if it is allowed under the county zoning code.
The old house took up 10 percent of the lot’s roughly 6,500 square feet, but the “footprint” of the new house will be about 35 percent.
And although most homes in the neighborhood are 2 1/2 stories, the plans for the new house appear to call for four, counting an attic and a first level that includes a garage and a bedroom. The house also would have a family room, dining room, living room, foyer, library, kitchen and breakfast area.
Turns out this is what got the moratorium launched in the first place.
Still, the house doesn’t sound totally unreasonable, based on the homes we looked at when we were on the market for a house. Granted, we have two less rooms — a living room and bedroom — on our first floor, and our garage will be a one-car garage, so the “footprint of our house isn’t that big. It also sounds like the house in the article — assuming it has a basement — will have three stories above ground, whereas ours will have two. So maybe the neighbors do have something to complain about here.
The problem is how do you reconcile the needs/desires of families looking for new homes today with the aesthetics of 20, 30, or even 40 years ago, when people’s housing needs and desires were quite different? Is this a matter of ”gentrification gone suburban? Or a matter of people wanting more than they actually need?
