ALLENSPARK, COLO. — Fed up with seeing outsize houses popping up in open spaces or overwhelming the scale of established neighborhoods, cities and counties across the United States are declaring war on McMansions.
Famously eco-friendly Boulder County, Colo., is considering forcing people in some rural areas to pay extra to build homes bigger than 3,000 square feet. Atlantic Beach, Fla., has restricted home size to half the square footage of lots, and the Los Angeles City Council is due to consider a similar measure.
In Minneapolis, reining in big homes was the top issue Betsy Hodges heard about when door-knocking in her successful campaign for City Council in 2005; last month she and the rest of the council unanimously passed a law restricting home size to half the square footage of each lot.
"There are blocks in my district where almost every house has been rebuilt," Hodges said last week. With homebuilders replacing "smaller houses and building larger homes, people felt they were losing the things they valued about their neighborhood."
McMansions are an issue mostly in built-out cities or in rural communities where residents hope to preserve a bucolic character, experts say. Traditionally, home size has been regulated by zoning laws that require structures to be set back a certain distance from the property line and permit building only within a "footprint." But as land prices rise and the desire for bigger houses grows, new housing is increasingly "bigfooting" lots and consuming airspace, leading to the rush to set limits.
The restrictions come at the tail end of the largest residential building boom in U.S. history. From 2000 to 2005, record numbers of single-family homes were constructed, often in place of older, more modest structures. That unprecedented explosion in homes "has produced so much change on the landscape that this is really a counter-response to it," said James W. Hughes, dean of Rutgers University's Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
In Salt Lake City, districts full of bungalows and Craftsman houses have suddenly been inundated by tear-downs, leading the City Council to limit most houses to a height of 28 feet. "It's a pretty popular thing to go back in and rebuild or knock down now," said George G. Shaw, the city's planning director. "People want to improve their property; they want more square footage."
In 1973, the median size of a new American home was 1,525 square feet; in 2006, it was 2,248 square feet.
