Oyster Bay
DIMENSION, PROPORTION
THE economic downturn may have slowed the number of applicants picking up building permits in this Nassau County enclave, but it hasn’t done much to ease discontent with what the town has already allowed in the way of construction: an impressive number of neoclassical trophy homes and supersized colonials on relatively small lots.
With longtime residents increasingly complaining that new two-story homes loom over their older houses and change the character of their streets, a proposal to limit the floor area ratio of one-family homes is now pending before the Oyster Bay Town Board.
According to Jack Libert, Oyster Bay’s commissioner of planning and development, officials have traditionally regulated home size by setting a maximum percentage of each lot that could be covered by a structure. If 20 percent coverage was allowed on a 10,000-square-foot lot, for instance, the “footprint” of a dwelling could be 2,000 square feet.
The new proposal goes a step further. The town is looking beyond the house’s basic footprint on the lot, to rein in the square footage in its upper floors.
Again taking the example of the 10,000-square-foot lot, Mr. Libert explained, the new rules would still dictate that the house’s footprint — its ground floor — be 2,000 square feet, but the developer “could only build 1,300 square feet above that.”
“By using floor area as well as the ground coverage” in the calculation, he added, officials can effectively respond to “what most people might feel is overbuilding.”
Bob Preston, a residential home builder with 30 years’ experience in the area, said he felt squeezed by these plans. With what homeowners are demanding of houses today, he said, “you can’t build a four-bedroom house” with such restrictions. He is also resistant to the proposed reduction in maximum roof height, to 26 feet from 28.
What can be built under the proposed code “prohibits the value of the property and the design function,” Mr. Preston said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
He added that the measures were ill timed. Those who do want to build, “let them afford to have the house they want,” Mr. Preston said. “Why would a town in this economic crisis try to put another nail in the housing market?”
But while the timing of Oyster Bay’s proposed restrictions may not dovetail effectively with a newly timid market for new homes, the call for such restrictions has been a long time coming — fueled by years of redevelopment.
A year and a half ago, after activists in the historic area of the hamlet of Oyster Bay enlisted town officials to adopt stronger restrictions and halt the replacement of 19th- and early-20th-century homes with “big square boxy houses,” homeowners in Hicksville and Massapequa — which fall within the overall town of Oyster Bay — jumped on the bandwagon, complaining that new houses were “dwarfing” older homes.
Mr. Libert was asked to study the problem throughout the town.
It was particularly troublesome in Massapequa, where “the real estate was so valuable it paid people to buy a house even for $1 million, tear it down and build a $3 million house on it,” he said, adding that longtime residents “found these new buildings objectionable.”
Kevin Kobs, president of the old Harbor Green Civic Association, a community of 420 homes built in the 1930s south of Merrick Road in Massapequa, said that in recent years builders had clear-cut properties, torn down trees and put up homes that towered over others.
“It is not to say that they are not nice,” Mr. Kobs said. “They just don’t fit in.”
A moratorium was put in place last year. Now Mr. Kobs is supporting the proposed zoning restrictions, to “strike a balance” and “try to protect the uniqueness and character of our community.”
Over the summer, the town of Easthampton in Suffolk County pursued similar changes, said Don Sharkey, the chief building inspector. Under its old code, an 8,000-square-foot house could be built on a half-acre lot. “They can get pretty looming and massive,” Mr. Sharkey said. The Town Board reduced the limit on a half-acre lot to 4,200 square feet.
Bill Fowkes, an Easthampton builder, objected to this, pointing out that “smaller houses can be just as ugly as big ones.”
“The rhythm of a neighborhood” — how cohesive it looks to someone walking down the street — “is more of a function of setbacks, height restrictions, site plans and how the house is orientated on the lot,” Mr. Fowkes said, suggesting a “design review board” instead.
But Mr. Sharkey demurred. “It is still a big house by any standards,” he said, “but not a McMansion,” because it occupies about 15 percent of the lot.
As for Oyster Bay, Mr. Libert denied that its goal was to prevent the construction of big houses.
“We are just trying to keep the size of the house in proportion with the lot it is being built on and the homes surrounding it,” he said. “On a two-acre lot you can build an almost 10,000-square-foot house — and on two acres it will look fine.”
source: ny times
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