June 18, 2004
Far Again?
The market seems to be slipping into the summer doldrums, with price reductions just about outnumbering new listings, so I thought I’d devote yet more space to our beloved floor area regulations; how they got here and why they provoke such opposition. Here goes. The average American home, I’ve read, has doubled in size since 1950, from 750 square feet to 1,500 (remember Joan Cusack’s line in “Gross Pointe Blank” about attending her high school reunion? Her classmates looked the same, she said, “except they’d swelled”). Greenwich is hardly average, but its housing has swelled along with the rest of the country. As houses expanded at the expense of lawns many townspeople objected and demanded that the Planning and Zoning Commission do something to stop it. The Commission members went up the mountain and came down with, they announced, the ideal size for all houses in each of our zones. R-4 (four acres): 10, 890 square feet; R-2: 7,840; R-1: 5,880, R-20 (20,000 sq. ft. lot): 4,500; R-12: 3,780; and R-7: 2,520. These Platonic ideals were enacted into law and everyone lived happily ever after.
Hardly. To achieve its goals, the P&Z decreed that each lot’s FAR would be calculated by a mathematical ratio of actual lot size multiplied by a specific formula that differed for each zone. Builders on a one acre lot, for instance, would multiply its area (43,560 sq. feet, for those non-farmers among you) by .135. R-20 owners would use .225, and so on. This would produce uniformity in house size if we lived in a planned development with each lot in a particular zone exactly the same size. We do not. Properties around town vary greatly in size, even within, say, the R-12 zones. The result is that FAR fails to stop some huge monstrosities from being erected while simultaneously preventing other houses from expanding by so much as a powder room. A tiny variation in lot size can produce huge gains or losses in FAR. Take two quarter acre lots, for example, one in the R-20 zone, the other in the R-12. A quarter acre lot (10,890 square feet) is undersized in the R-20 zone and applying the appropriate ratio produces a house limited to just 2,450 square feet. In the R-7 zone, on the other hand, that same lot is over-sized and FAR rewards it with permission to build a 3,920 sq.ft. house. If each of these odd-sized properties were located on a street of conforming lots the R-20 cottage would be flanked by houses of 4,500 feet and the R-7 castle would tower over homes just about half its size. The idea behind FAR (assuming it isn’t sheer jealousy at neighbors erecting houses bigger than our own) is that we can preserve the “streetscapes” of our neighborhoods by ensuring that the homes in a given neighborhood are roughly the same size. A 2,450 foot house does not achieve this in a neighborhood of homes twice as big and a neither does a 4,000 foot home in a neighborhood of 2,500 foot homes. By the way, it doesn’t take much additional land to turn an R-7 home into a quarter–acre whopper; the R-7’s 100X70 foot lot need only be 100X109 feet—not enough difference, in my opinion, to make such a large house blend in with its neighbors.
FAR isn’t stopping the over-building on some lots but does a fine job of whacking value from under-sized lots. Your 2,520 foot cottage may seem perfectly adequate for your needs and just as nice as that of your neighbor’s similarly-sized house, but if his is on a conforming lot and yours is on our hypothetical R-20 quarter-acre, the two houses aren’t even close in value. Buyers will reward him for the ability to add on and punish you for the lack of expansion room. To me, that seems unnecessary and unfair.
A Modest Proposal
David Ogilvy has just listed an eighty acre parcel in Conyer’s Farm. You probably won’t find its purchase price, $53,000,000, in your spare change box but if you like horses, and someone very, very rich likes you, you’re in luck. This place has everything the well heeled equestrian might need, including white-fence paddocks, a twenty-two stall stable, high, rolling meadows and, of course, houses; lots of houses. In addition to the renovated main house there are five cottages andcaretaker and staff apartments scattered about the grounds. If none of them suits you, you might consider bulldozing everything and building anew. The Conyer’s Farm architectural board might object but you won’t hear a peep from our P&Z enforcers; by my math, the maximum allowable FAR for the place is around 218,000 square feet, enough for almost any of our new generation.
The market seems to be slipping into the summer doldrums, with price reductions just about outnumbering new listings, so I thought I’d devote yet more space to our beloved floor area regulations; how they got here and why they provoke such opposition. Here goes. The average American home, I’ve read, has doubled in size since 1950, from 750 square feet to 1,500 (remember Joan Cusack’s line in “Gross Pointe Blank” about attending her high school reunion? Her classmates looked the same, she said, “except they’d swelled”). Greenwich is hardly average, but its housing has swelled along with the rest of the country. As houses expanded at the expense of lawns many townspeople objected and demanded that the Planning and Zoning Commission do something to stop it. The Commission members went up the mountain and came down with, they announced, the ideal size for all houses in each of our zones. R-4 (four acres): 10, 890 square feet; R-2: 7,840; R-1: 5,880, R-20 (20,000 sq. ft. lot): 4,500; R-12: 3,780; and R-7: 2,520. These Platonic ideals were enacted into law and everyone lived happily ever after.
Hardly. To achieve its goals, the P&Z decreed that each lot’s FAR would be calculated by a mathematical ratio of actual lot size multiplied by a specific formula that differed for each zone. Builders on a one acre lot, for instance, would multiply its area (43,560 sq. feet, for those non-farmers among you) by .135. R-20 owners would use .225, and so on. This would produce uniformity in house size if we lived in a planned development with each lot in a particular zone exactly the same size. We do not. Properties around town vary greatly in size, even within, say, the R-12 zones. The result is that FAR fails to stop some huge monstrosities from being erected while simultaneously preventing other houses from expanding by so much as a powder room. A tiny variation in lot size can produce huge gains or losses in FAR. Take two quarter acre lots, for example, one in the R-20 zone, the other in the R-12. A quarter acre lot (10,890 square feet) is undersized in the R-20 zone and applying the appropriate ratio produces a house limited to just 2,450 square feet. In the R-7 zone, on the other hand, that same lot is over-sized and FAR rewards it with permission to build a 3,920 sq.ft. house. If each of these odd-sized properties were located on a street of conforming lots the R-20 cottage would be flanked by houses of 4,500 feet and the R-7 castle would tower over homes just about half its size. The idea behind FAR (assuming it isn’t sheer jealousy at neighbors erecting houses bigger than our own) is that we can preserve the “streetscapes” of our neighborhoods by ensuring that the homes in a given neighborhood are roughly the same size. A 2,450 foot house does not achieve this in a neighborhood of homes twice as big and a neither does a 4,000 foot home in a neighborhood of 2,500 foot homes. By the way, it doesn’t take much additional land to turn an R-7 home into a quarter–acre whopper; the R-7’s 100X70 foot lot need only be 100X109 feet—not enough difference, in my opinion, to make such a large house blend in with its neighbors.
FAR isn’t stopping the over-building on some lots but does a fine job of whacking value from under-sized lots. Your 2,520 foot cottage may seem perfectly adequate for your needs and just as nice as that of your neighbor’s similarly-sized house, but if his is on a conforming lot and yours is on our hypothetical R-20 quarter-acre, the two houses aren’t even close in value. Buyers will reward him for the ability to add on and punish you for the lack of expansion room. To me, that seems unnecessary and unfair.
A Modest Proposal
David Ogilvy has just listed an eighty acre parcel in Conyer’s Farm. You probably won’t find its purchase price, $53,000,000, in your spare change box but if you like horses, and someone very, very rich likes you, you’re in luck. This place has everything the well heeled equestrian might need, including white-fence paddocks, a twenty-two stall stable, high, rolling meadows and, of course, houses; lots of houses. In addition to the renovated main house there are five cottages andcaretaker and staff apartments scattered about the grounds. If none of them suits you, you might consider bulldozing everything and building anew. The Conyer’s Farm architectural board might object but you won’t hear a peep from our P&Z enforcers; by my math, the maximum allowable FAR for the place is around 218,000 square feet, enough for almost any of our new generation.
posted by Chris Fountain at 10:14 AM
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