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Cutting houses down to size

December 11, 2007 12:35 am

They've been called everything from "McMansions" to "trophy homes."

Whatever the name, large, new houses that go up in place of older ones in established neighborhoods have gotten under the skin of enough Fredericksburgers that the issue shot to the top of the City Council's to-do list for implementing its new Comprehensive Plan.

The trend is part of the desire among homeowners nationwide for bigger spaces.

According to city senior planner Erik Nelson, the average American home in 1950 was 983 square feet. Today, that average has grown to 2,265 square feet.

In addition, land in the city costs more than in outlying areas.

Nelson wrote in a release that that can contribute to the trend of tear-downs.

"A buyer who pays a premium for real estate usually wants the house to be consistent with the price," he wrote, "which sometimes means that the buyer wants to tear down the exist-ing house and build one considered more suitable, to the price if not necessarily to the neighborhood."

When a building isn't in a historic district, there's really not much the city can do to prevent a property owner from tearing it down.

So with a proposed new ordinance, planners have sought to regulate the dimensions of what goes in place of a demolished house.

At Wednesday's Planning Commission meeting, residents will be able to comment on that ordinance.

The two dimensions it seeks to regulate are the maximum height of new houses and the percentage of a lot they can cover.

City planners found that most homes in Fredericksburg neighborhoods have two stories or fewer. The ordinance would bring the maximum building height in residential districts down from 35 feet to 27 feet to try to keep new houses more in line with existing ones.

Planners also looked at maps and found that most city homes cover between 10 and 30 percent of the lots they stand on. To keep new homes within that norm, the city is proposing that new homes cover no more than 25 percent of a lot.

Property owners would be able to seek a special use permit to go beyond the height and coverage limits, but would have to show that exceeding those would not adversely impact their neighbors.