Austin Contrarian

McDuplex

Frequent commenter Don Johnson, an infill developer, sent me the picture below, which nicely illustrates how the McMansion regulations actually encourage the construction of massive duplexes.

 

Requiring the units to share a common wall guarantees a massive structure.  The building envelope eliminates any interesting architectural variation and forces every structure to the middle of the lot.  Mandating side-wall articulation means a jagged, jumbled design.

The worst provision is probably the common-wall requirement.  The developers I've spoken to say they'd prefer to separate the units, using the garage as the connection.  (Many pre-McMansion duplexes have this form.)  This would result in two smaller units rather than one giant structure.  But the McTask Force apparently felt developers were circumventing our anachronistic lot-size requirements, so they decided to stick us with these hulking structures -- duplexes guaranteed to clash with the existing stock.

Thanks, Task Force.  Thanks a lot.

Duplex update.

I spoke with a local AIA architect in order to get a better grasp of last night's amendments to the McMansion and duplex ordinances.

Some good news and some bad news (or some bad news and some good news, depending on your perspective.)

The duplex ordinance amendment was not as dire as I had feared because of changes to the ordinance originally proposed by the Task Force.  As I discussed here, the Task Force had recommended that the common wall between two duplexes be perpendicular to the front lot line.  This essentially would have mandated that all duplexes sit side by side or on top of one another (the latter, an unpopular choice), thereby banning duplexes on long, narrow lots.

The ordinance language as enacted, however, omits the perpendicular-to-the-front requirement and permits the common wall to be articulated in 4-foot segments.  A skilled architect can use this provision to fit a longer common wall (two times as long) within the same amount of space.  This will allow duplexes to be placed front-to-back on a long, narrow lot.  While the lot might not have enough space from one side to the other for a straight common wall, it might be wide enough for this articulated common wall.

The neighborhood types wanted to eliminate this "zipper" provision because, I assume, they don't want duplexes aligned from front to rear.  City staff pushed for the zipper provision, which made it into the version adopted by Council.

Good.

The "bad" relates to basements.  Basements that meet certain requirements do not count against the maximum floor-to-area ratio.  One of the requirements is that the basement be below a certain "grade."  The Task Force recommended (and Council approved) a requirement that the basement be below both "natural grade" and "finished grade."  Others (including the AIA) wanted to stop at "natural grade."

Here's the issue, as explained to me:  Requring a basement to be below natural grade provides sufficient protection.  Natural grade is the land's undisturbed state; a developer can't build a "pedestal" by pushing dirt around to sneak in an above-ground third story.

But requiring that the basement also be below "finished grade" precludes a "walk-out" basement.  Even if the basement is below natural grade, if you make a cut in the natural grade to create a separate entrance to the basement, you are now below the "finished" grade.  This means that "walk-out" basements will not be eligible for the FAR exemption.

I don't think basements are very common today because of their expense, so I'm not sure how big a deal this is.  However, they may become more common in the future as developers and homeowners turn to them for otherwise verboten floor space.  This amendment will preclude their use as separate apartments.

The duplex vendetta.

Someone must have decided that the City is "soft" on duplexes. That's the only conclusion one can draw from an ordinance that the City Council is scheduled to consider tonight.  This ordinance will make it next to impossible to build dupexes on long, narrow lots.

Duplexes are one of the last affordable options for central Austin. The McMansion Task Force nevertheless did its best to discourage them by drastically curtailing the allowable footprint and mass of structures on central Austin lots.

But the McMansion ordinance apparently didn't do enough to dampen duplex construction.  Architects and developers are still managing to fit duplexes on narrow lots while complying with the McMansion ordinance's strict "building envelope" and floor-to-area ratio limits.

We should be saying, "Bully for the architects and developers."  Instead, the Residential Development Regulations Task Force (a/k/a the McMansion Task Force) has proposed redefining "duplex" to require the units to sit either side by side or on top of one another.  Developers will no longer be permitted to put one unit at the front of the property and one unit at the rear.

(Two units technically form a "duplex" when they share a common wall or floor/ceiling along 50% of the building's depth.  Today that depth can be measured either from the front to the rear of the lot or from one side of the lot to the other.  The ordinance will mandate that the common wall be perpendicular to the front lot line.  In other words, the units must sit side by side or be stacked, which is more expensive and less desirable to prospective owners/tenants.)

It is impossible to put duplex units side-by-side without a sufficiently wide lot.  Consider a 60-foot lot.  With, say, 10-foot side setbacks, that leaves just 20 feet of width per unit -- and the code-mandated garages/carports alone will require almost all of that space.  (Just in case someone could manage to sneak in a garage and front entrance, though, the Task Force is also recommending that the front entrance have a "porch," presumably to leave less room for the garages/carports.)

The Austin chapter of the American Institute of Architects has politely pointed out that this ordinance is a bad idea.  It put together some nice diagrams illustrating the proposal's impact, which I am putting below the jump.

Swamped

Really, really swamped.

It's frustrating because the Residential Development Standards Task Force is recommending some blog-worthy amendments (pdf) to the McMansion ordinance.

I can only muster the energy to quote.  My favorite recommendation will close that loophole for "massive" carports:

ISSUE

Parking area open on two or more sides:  Currently, if an applicant is proposing to construct a carport, they are allowed to take up to 450 sq ft from the FAR [floor-to-area ratio] calculation.  A carport is defined as a parking area that iS open on two or more sides, but the definition does not specifically state of [sic] how large the opening may be.  Many proposed carports have only partial openings which contribute mass to the structure.

TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATION

Give a specific measurement (percentage) of the opening of the carport.  The ordinance should state that in order to get the carport/parking exemption, the open sides of a carport must be clear and unobstructed by any materials for a minimum of 80% of the area measured below the top of the top wall plate to the finished floor of the carport.  RDCC can waive up to 25% of the required opening (80% can go to 60%).  (Section 2.8.1)

Want to put up a tasteful lattice on the side of that carport?  Nope, not even the RDCC can authorize it.  Get a bigger lot or build a smaller home.  We Austinites evidently prefer clear and unobstructed views of the neighbor's 1977 Gremlin to a little "mass" (a/k/a "a screen"). 

The McMansion ordinance's impact

Today's Statesman (Feb. 18) has an interesting article on the McMansion ordinance's impact.

A couple of quick reactions.  First, the article implies that the McMansion ordinance has not affected property values:

The predictions were dire.

Rules designed to limit the sizes of new houses in almost 50 Central Austin neighborhoods would lead to plummeting land values, vanishing nest eggs and far fewer modern houses for buyers to choose from, warned Austin home builders and property owners opposed to the regulations.

But 16 months after the Residential Design and Compatibility Standards were put in place to limit the impact of large new houses on adjacent homes and the character of neighborhoods, and though concerns about the overall rules linger, property values haven't dropped, and construction activity has increased.

In fact, median prices of single-family homes in neighborhoods such as Hyde Park, Tarrytown and Travis Heights increased in 2006 and 2007, and the city issued 2,452 permits for new houses, additions and remodels in the affected neighborhoods last year, 455 more than in 2005.

For what it's worth, I never believed the McMansion ordinance would hurt the value of lots across the board.  I thought (and still think) the McMansion ordinance has or will hurt the value of small lots relative to large lots.  Given sufficient rising demand, the value of small lots may not have dropped.  But they should have appreciated more slowly than larger lots.

(There's some anecdotal evidence this is true, incidentally:  Steve Crossland compared the rate of appreciation of small homes and large homes in 2006 (see comments to Steve's post).  He found that large homes appreciated 50% faster than small homes (14.63% to 9.65%) in 2006, the year the McMansion ordinance took effect.  This is odd, because normally one would expect small homes to appreciate more rapidly, since most of the value is in the right to build, rather than in the size of the lot.  This statistic is thus consistent with my claim, but hardly proof -- we used home sizes as a proxy for lot sizes, and did not control for the quality of the existing homes.  Also, the numbers flipped in the first quarter of 2007.)

Second, it looks like I was right that the design review commission would become a vehicle for regulating aesthetics.  Here's the article:

Home builder Glenn Reynolds of Cool River Custom Homes said that he isn't opposed to size restrictions but that the rules as written will ultimately lead to cookie-cutter homes.

"We're not a builder that goes out and says we want to take a 5,400-square-foot lot and put a 4,000-square-foot home on it. That's ridiculous," he said. "When it comes to things like 45 percent impervious cover and 40 percent (floor area ratio), those types of items I'm in complete agreement with. What scares me is the review board is taking that a step farther and is basically starting to determine the aesthetic effect for every single home."

The rule that has caused the most frustration for builders requires them to include design features to prevent a "billboard effect": huge, plain side walls looming over nearby houses. To follow that rule, many builders are breaking up the side wall by making the second story narrower than the first, one example of the kind of formulaic design that they say the ordinance has led to.

Builders and architects also complain that the design review commission that was set up to hear appeals regarding the new rules gives too much weight to the opinions of neighboring property owners.

"They have given power unduly to the residents in the neighborhood," architect Dean Rose of PFA Design Group said. "It's now a vigilante committee."

Here's what I wrote back in October 2006:

Anyone who's seen enough zoning hearings knows what this will degenerate into.  The neighborhoods will use the waiver request to impose their taste.  (They will quickly detect how far they can go before the owner decides the costs aren't worth the benefits of the waiver.) These hearings will rarely be about just massing, scale or compatibility.  Owners who want a side articulation waiver will be told they should be using wood siding rather than stone, or stone rather than wood, or brick rather than stone.  Or they'll be told to get rid of some windows on their proposed second story ("it's too intrusive").  Or they'll be told to add some windows ("it's too monolithic").  We'll hear complaints about roof pitch.  Placement of porches.  Design of the garage.  Any design feature that can cause the slightest annoyance will be fair game.  Neighbors can expect a sympathetic audience from the RDCC.

More later.  Maybe.

Update on the fight over the McMansion ordinance in Central East Austin (updated)

Dee Copeland at Texas Realty Blog has a nice update on OCEAN's attempt to repeal the McMansion ordinance's minimum floor-to-area ratio for Central East Austin homes.  Quite predictably, OCEAN is getting pushback from the small lot owners who would be hurt by this change.

The opposition is being spearheaded by "Hollywood" Henderson.  You can read his "Dear Neighbor" letter/petition at Dee's blog.

Update:  City Council denied the amendment unanimously.

Marx on McMansions, and "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart"

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence.  But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.  The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

That's Marx from Wage Labour and Capital, as quoted in Tom Slee's No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart.  McMansions evidently were getting people worked up as far back as 1849.

By the way, if you want an enjoyable, leftist-ish critique of markets, I recommend Slee's book.  It's an attack on "MarketThink," his vaguely Orwellian term for the belief that markets and consumer choice always produce the best result.  (The title of the book is ironic -- the people who say such things are his targets.)  His main point is that everyone's choices are tangled together, so that each person's choice affects everyone else.  As a result, there's no guarantee that even perfectly rational individual choices will make you happy.

Slee sets up his share of straw men.  Still, his book is a clean, elegant exposition of different types of market failures.  Some of them are almost trite, such as the "tragedy of the commons"-type market failure that causes congested roads and littered parks.  Others are fresher.  When buyers can't get reliable information about product quality until they buy the product, low-quality products may drive high-quality products out of the marketplace.  This, he claims, explains why fast-food restaurants, with their predictable but mediocre food, drive higher-quality local restaurants out of business.  Network effects may force consumers to choose sub-optimal products -- e.g., business people use Microsoft Word because everyone else uses it, not because it is necessarily very good word processing software. 

The McMansion ordinance as an anti-gentrification tool

The Organization for Central East Austin Neighborhoods (OCEAN) wants to drop the McMansion ordinance's guaranteed minimum home size of 2,300 sq. ft. for Central East Austin lots:

Over the years, Rudolph Williams has watched house sizes grow in Central East Austin. More and more, two- and three-story houses are replacing the one-story, 1,500-square-foot houses typical of the area.

Although the city clamped down on home sizes in proportion to lot sizes last year, he has been working to tighten the rules even more for the smaller lots in his area — those less than 5,750 square feet — as a way to protect the area's character, culture, diversity and history.

. . .

Currently, the rules say that on lots of all sizes, a property owner can build a residential structure that is 2,300 square feet or has a floor area that is 40 percent of the area of the lot, whichever is greater.

The neighborhoods organization wants to remove the 2,300 square feet allowance for lots less than 5,750 square feet. So on a lot that's 5,000 square feet, the biggest house could be 2,000 square feet.

The article implies that OCEAN's main concern is gentrification:

Limiting the size of houses on smaller lots would help reduce tear-downs of rental units, the primary affordable housing option for low-income people in Central East Austin neighborhoods, and force developers to build smaller, Williams said.

However, the change wouldn't be effective alone, Williams said. It must come with other protections from local government and school authorities, such as tax relief for renters and increased homestead protection for poor homeowners, he said.

"We're at a tipping point right now. Can we create a neighborhood where rich and poor can live together?" Williams asked. "Or will this be another gentrification story? Another Clarksville?"

Gentrification is a complex issue.  I don't want to tackle it here.  But if you think you need to adopt anti-gentrification measures, I question whether you should start by stripping equity from the small lot owners.

Given the prices in Central East Austin, the loss of 300 buildable square feet would probably be worth $10,000-$20,000 to the small-lot owners (lots with around 5,000 sq. ft.).  Eliminating the McMansion minimum would hurt them and no one else.  It would not penalize the owners of lots that have already been redeveloped -- i.e., the yuppies living in spanking new $300,000 homes.   

I haven't been to a single OCEAN neighborhood association meeting.  Perhaps the people who would be adversely affected by this uniformly support it (in the hope of lower taxes, for example).  But I'm always skeptical of plans that would put all of the burden on a small minority, particularly a minority that had the least to begin with.  Neighborhood groups aren't as homogeneous as they sometimes claim to be.  The City Council should do its due diligence this time:  Before ordering small-lot owners to fight gentrification on behalf of everyone else, it should make sure they are volunteers rather than conscripts. 

Note:  I inadvertently published an earlier, very rough draft below the fold.  (There wasn't supposed to be a "fold.")  Sorry for the gibberish.

Transferable McMansion development rights

Trying to get caught up . . .

From Time Magazine, on Boulder County, Colorado's new McMansion ordinance:

Michelle Krezek, Boulder County land use manager, said the commissioners "want to allow property owners who either have or want smaller-scale homes to be able to sell a portion of their 'unused' square footage." Homeowners willing to sign away their option to someday add additions to their houses would receive a one-time payment as well as lower yearly tax assessments on their homes. The forfeited enlargement rights would then be available for purchase through a specially established market. Residents planning to build or expand homes larger than the recommended thresholds — 7,000 square feet on the plains, 5,000 square feet in the mountains — would be required to purchase additional development rights at prices determined by the market, which might be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per property. Krezek adds: "This will allow for an ongoing diversity of housing stock and allow for people of varied means to own homes in Boulder County."

Although both Boulder and Austin now have something called a "McMansion ordinance," they are nothing alike.  Austin's ordinance targets "McMansions" as small as 2,300 square feet (or smaller, if the owners have the temerity to include an attached two-car garage).  Boulder's is aimed at 5,000 to 7,000+ square foot homes, two to three times the size of the average new American home. 

But the bigger difference is probably the method of regulation.  Austin has chosen a heavy-handed command-and-control regime, with dense regulations that specify everything from gable height to roof pitch to the jogs ("articulation") in side walls.  Austin's regulations also freeze current entitlements in place, rewarding those who have already added to or redeveloped their property at the expense of those who have not.  Boulder has chosen a more flexible, market-like approach.  Owners who put a high value on extra space can buy the development rights from owners who do not. 

I think Boulder's ordinance is infinitely superior to Austin's.  I think both are wrong to arbitrarily cap the total square footage of housing space.  But at least under Boulder's system, the square footage will be allocated efficiently.

I'm not sure how Boulder justifies its ordinance, though.  It cannot be justified by concerns over massing, scale, neighborhood character, shadows, backyard gardens, or the privacy to lounge naked in your backyard with the salamanders, because super-size homes can still be built in the midst of smaller homes as long as the owners are willing to pay a premium.

Boulder's ordinance reinforces my belief that at root McMansion regulations are about status anxiety.  The home and neighborhood a homeowner chooses signal his relative status.  Tear-downs in a neighborhood change the relative rank of homes, forcing owners of older homes down the status ladder.  This may not be a big deal for those who are already at the bottom, or for those at the top who could match the new construction if they wanted to.  But it could matter a lot to the status-sensitive in the middle who can't help being outclassed.  (Whether our land-use regulations ought to cater to middle-class insecurities is of course a separate question . . . )

McMansions in the New York 'burbs

From the New York Times.

Here's the accompanying photo:

 

I assume the house on the left is being singled out as a McMansion.  I doubt it would have been singled out if it were less ostentatious and followed the neighborhood's architectural style.  This house isn't "too big," in other words; it's too showy, with bad architecture to boot.