From the Home News Tribune:
Towns seek to regulate “McMansions”
With an ever-shrinking amount of buildable land, some Central Jersey municipalities are asking a new question about houses: How big is too big?
Bernards, Chatham Township and Bedminster this year limited the width of houses on smaller lots, typically three quarters of an acre and smaller. In Bedminster, new or renovated houses can be no more than half the width of the lot.
Bernards is now re-assessing how tall a house can be. Like many municipalities, the township already limits houses to 2.5 stories, or 35 feet, in residential zones. Mayor John Malay said some builders have been creating “mounds,” allowing a walk-out basement where most first levels would be, and building up from there.
Doing so, Malay said, can save a builder from blasting through bedrock for an underground basement. New, oversized homes can dwarf existing dwellings — making an unattractive patchwork of homes in long-established neighborhoods, he said.
“You don’t want one house in the neighborhood towering above the other houses,” Malay said.
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James Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, said affluent communities across New Jersey are dealing with the tear-down and in-fill trend.“People are crowding into the winners’ circles,” Hughes said.
He said people are dividing larger lots that were used to build now-outdated ranches and split-levels in the 1950s or 1960s. As the land below homes has become more valuable than the structure on it, people are tearing down a home to build a new, bigger home from sideyard to sideyard.
“Then the problem arises — a home just looks too big for the lot,” Hughes said.
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While some neighborhoods in town are bound to regenerate, Banisch said the ordinance helps maintain neighborhoods of “affordable housing with a small ‘a.”‘That way smaller Cape Cod homes will be available to someone who can’t can’t afford the “monster home” down the street, Banisch said.
The Bedminster Planning Board grappled with limiting home sizes as well, Planning Board Chairman Paul Henderson said. The board tried a number of formulas, including taking the average square footage of a homes on a street. Finally, the board decided a home can only be 50 percent of its lot width.
“The issue was houses were being knocked down and houses were being built that really dwarfed the other houses,” Henderson said.