My favorite part of this saga is how quickly the “single family” zoning defenders have gone to war against somebody trying to keep their family together. Just to make this point explicitly clear: “single family” doesn’t actually mean a single family to these NIMBYs.
That's the point I kind of make, that they take it as a kind of generality meaning a place that looks and feels like their idea of suburbia. They think of the zoning ordinance as a property right *they* hold to make the neighborhood feel right.
I think you comment about the “cars” vs “people” states it well. “Single family” simply mean 3-4 cars (or people) per household, not anything related to the family itself
I am a housing advocate. I am all for 3 generations living together. I think ADUs belong everywhere. I love your columns. However, in this case, the addition is too large, too tall, insensitive to the next door neighbors, and shouldn’t be OK with the zoning code. If I lived next door, I wouldn’t be saying that it was big but I should get used to it because it serves a good purpose. I’d just be really, really annoyed with my neighbor and trying figure out how to stop it. Neighbors don’t object to McMansions because they either have property around them or buyers know they’ll have other houses close by—but those people would be screaming about an addition like this even if it wasn’t next door! And yes, the addition does resemble an apartment house!!
I understand this view completely. The counter for me is, how do you eventually achieve higher densities in at least some of the neighborhoods that look like this? Because in expensive markets, that has to happen. IOW, how do you distinguish between actual "overdevelopment" and simply the discomfort/uncanniness of a place undergoing a transition?
It's a real problem, especially in my town. Even in the more urban areas, people don't want change or larger buildings. We are a resort community, with all the problems that brings, and desperately need housing for locals, as opposed to those who can afford higher rents and home prices (which are out of sight). People want us to be quaint and also the same as we were 20 or 30 years ago! ADU's are a big help and get people used to the idea that more than one family can live in a house, as are duplexes and small affordable homes, etc. However, a lot of the solutions that sound good are not financially feasible and also don't get us where we need to be fast enough. Plus the NIMBYS are organized and loud. the transition has to happen, and we need local leaders who can lead us to where we need to be.
For example, we have a piece of town-owned land in a very appropriate location that could be used for a lot of housing, housing plus recreation, or just recreation. The village it's in wants recreation only, and town leaders won't step up and say that we have to use at least some of it for higher density housing, so let's figure out how we an come up with a pan. It's been sitting there for years!
The type of house you call an incredibly common sight in old NVA neighborhoods is becoming common in my old MD neighborhhood and it actually does spark outrage in me. I'm offended by it because it looks big enough for four apartments but only provides housing for one family! Seems to me that that's how you could achieve density - if houses that look like those McMansions don't bother people, build them as two or four family homes.
Oh and I agree that the addition that this post is about is not OK. There are ways they could have expanded their house that wouldn't look as objectionable or block so much light - people in my neighborhood have also expanded their houses to McMansion size by adding stories or building out into the backyard. That addition looks like they skipped the expense of an architect and did the cheapest DIY thing. I think a middle ground between suburban aesthetics and density IS possible, but that's not it.
You articulate my thoughts very well. I would be pissed. Not because of the cars, or because it is multi family but because it's ridiculously high for its location and super close to the other properties.
I am all for blending multi-family housing into single family neighborhooods. We need more housing! But some design sensitivity goes a long way towards alleviating these kinds of conflicts.
I think it's notable that it is in the side of the house, making it asymmetrical. Did the zoning code forbid an extension of the house towards the back? I wonder if a backyard building would have provoked the same backlash.
Your article has me thinking a lot about the cultural issues underlying this dilemma. I grew up just outside Worcester, MA. That city was an early adopter of zoning regs in the first few decades of the 20th century. The big target was triple deckers. The city’s full of them to this day, whether cheap tenements or versions that stacked 3k+ sq ft homes on top of each other in affluent neighborhoods. The target at the time was the cheaper, faster to market version being built by immigrants, especially Catholics, and the public language wasn’t always euphemistic. Juno to 100+ years later, Deeply embedded is this belief that once you go MF, it’s all downhill from there. Neighborhood downfall? Nobody blames the factory owners who sold their businesses oversees or the fact our economic development efforts fall short allowing places to churn out a steady stream of new business. Because our focus from day one was rooted in socially engineering those neighborhoods. Nobody wants to be a bigot, but that’s what often and historically underlies the idea of zoning exclusion in the first place.
As someone who lives in a house 6 ft. away from my neighbor, the most important thing in a situation like this is who are your actual neighbors! I could be annoyed by the structure but if they are good people, I could care less.
I would say there’s a racial element at play here as well. This construction is for a multi-generational Asian family and let’s face it, many stereotypes and bigotry come with that. The other giant home you showed fits the “American” ideal or aesthetic of a large single family home with a bedroom for every child.
Just a note that the other property mentioned as a complete teardown in the neighborhood actually burned down. Not that it takes away from the very real phenomenon in Northern Virginia of demolishing older homes in favor of bigger, more McMansion-style homes, but this neighborhood has by and large not seen this kind of replacement development. It is mostly people adding on sunrooms or building out over their garages, with varying levels of commitment to the original architectural style of the homes.
I doubt the aeasthetic or parking concerns would generate anywhere near this level of outrage if we hadn't decided as a country that a vast proportion of each household's wealth would reside in property values, which could take a dive due to the extension.
I wrote about this case a few weeks ago in the context of recent research that finds that concerns about aesthetic “fit” tend to drive NIMBYism more than the pecuniary concerns of incumbent homeowners. It doesn’t challenge the fundamental problem of ossified suburbs, but it helps explain why resistance is the default to new forms.
You’ve been hitting them out of the ball park all year, Addison, but this essay is so pitch-perfect that I even risked sharing it with my mostly NIMBY neighborhood listserv. It’s just right.
I'll actually defend the fit of this structure. Anything looks worse when it's unfinished plywood. When it's done it will be very similar to the ugly garage with floor above of the house on the left. The only difference is the flat roof and being a bit higher. It looks huge because the house on the right is a rancher. But what will this shade? That neighbor's wide driveway and windowless garage.
Housing is transitioning across America and the zoning laws are being stressed. People assume our new house is a tear-down, but we found a vacate lot that never had a home on it. While the footprint doesn't match adjacent homes, the design is re-establishing the historical fabric. There are two parts to the solution. Zoning and Design and of course the design is subjective and unless we have a design overlay (such as a historic overlay) it can't be controlled.
What America needs is a cabinet level position called the "Architect General" to provide a design vision for the country. Of course that too will be a battle between modernist, traditionalist and utility, but at least it would create a national discourse that could filter down to the state, counties and cities.
The last thing we need is every town looking the same because some federal bureaucrat pushed a specific type of house. I still wretch at the brutalist style federal buildings.
Wait, in what universe do "all the apartment buildings look the same"? I live in Manhattan and even after decades here I'm still constantly impressed by the variety and sheer beauty of the thousands of residential buildings here.
It’s just a cheaply built addition that doesn’t look like everything else in the neighborhood. If it had snazzy modern design features maybe people wouldn’t care so much, but if I were the neighbor, I would be pissed too, because it’s cheap and ugly, and clearly the builder had no consideration for the neighbor’s life, you know? It’s going to throw a huge shadow over the neighbor’s house for at least part of every day. Part of the reason I live on acreage out in the woods. My closest neighbors are a thousand yards away, and they still do things that annoy me.
As I've written before, I can't tell you how grateful I am for these essays. I'm fortunate to have spent my life alternating between a dense Manhattan neighborhood and in the area surrounding a New England town, and I continue (based on this) to love cities and countryside and to abhor suburbs.
This is (I realize) a privileged and radical position: I understand that a great majority of Americans live their lives in sprawl and developments and shop at strip malls etc. and that this is what millions of people like...but I still see them as victims of the blight of cars (as Addison keeps saying) and the business forces that have destroyed towns and hollowed out cities in order to create commute-based lives and ugly "communities" which are corporate projects with a thin veneer (literally) of Disneyland-style nostalgia for some kind of hazy fantasy of "home-ownership" that's been systematically instilled in the population at least since WWII.
I am a property owner in New York City, which means that I have invested in a living space that has no shingles, garage, lawn, fence, driveway, or any of those features of "homeownership" that are supposed to be at the heart of the American dream — but I don't think I am lacking anything. Just because I can't go mow my lawn or be surrounded by a synthetic view of identical pitched roofs out the window, doesn't make me any less a homeowner. I have neighbors and a community and nearby churches and schools and everything else that's supposed to make for a community, but I don't have to drive anywhere; I can literally walk to where the symphony orchestra plays or to Central Park or to any of dozens of neighborhood spots to eat or into parks or wherever I want to go.
And yet (especially during the past decade), I've had to listen to a clamor of fellow citizens insisting that this scenario is "a hellhole" full of "crime" and "undesirables" while my relatives in suburbs plead with me year after year to abandon all of this so that I can live in a fake-colonial "home" in the middle of acres of fake streets with fake English names (created by a committee on a drawing board) with the neighbors eyeing my suspiciously and the nearest cup of coffee or sandwich a fifteen-minute drive away.
Anyway, hopefully over the next century people will come to their senses about both cities and outlying areas and this nationwide car-based blight will be transcended.
My favorite part of this saga is how quickly the “single family” zoning defenders have gone to war against somebody trying to keep their family together. Just to make this point explicitly clear: “single family” doesn’t actually mean a single family to these NIMBYs.
That's the point I kind of make, that they take it as a kind of generality meaning a place that looks and feels like their idea of suburbia. They think of the zoning ordinance as a property right *they* hold to make the neighborhood feel right.
I think you comment about the “cars” vs “people” states it well. “Single family” simply mean 3-4 cars (or people) per household, not anything related to the family itself
I am a housing advocate. I am all for 3 generations living together. I think ADUs belong everywhere. I love your columns. However, in this case, the addition is too large, too tall, insensitive to the next door neighbors, and shouldn’t be OK with the zoning code. If I lived next door, I wouldn’t be saying that it was big but I should get used to it because it serves a good purpose. I’d just be really, really annoyed with my neighbor and trying figure out how to stop it. Neighbors don’t object to McMansions because they either have property around them or buyers know they’ll have other houses close by—but those people would be screaming about an addition like this even if it wasn’t next door! And yes, the addition does resemble an apartment house!!
I understand this view completely. The counter for me is, how do you eventually achieve higher densities in at least some of the neighborhoods that look like this? Because in expensive markets, that has to happen. IOW, how do you distinguish between actual "overdevelopment" and simply the discomfort/uncanniness of a place undergoing a transition?
It's a real problem, especially in my town. Even in the more urban areas, people don't want change or larger buildings. We are a resort community, with all the problems that brings, and desperately need housing for locals, as opposed to those who can afford higher rents and home prices (which are out of sight). People want us to be quaint and also the same as we were 20 or 30 years ago! ADU's are a big help and get people used to the idea that more than one family can live in a house, as are duplexes and small affordable homes, etc. However, a lot of the solutions that sound good are not financially feasible and also don't get us where we need to be fast enough. Plus the NIMBYS are organized and loud. the transition has to happen, and we need local leaders who can lead us to where we need to be.
For example, we have a piece of town-owned land in a very appropriate location that could be used for a lot of housing, housing plus recreation, or just recreation. The village it's in wants recreation only, and town leaders won't step up and say that we have to use at least some of it for higher density housing, so let's figure out how we an come up with a pan. It's been sitting there for years!
The type of house you call an incredibly common sight in old NVA neighborhoods is becoming common in my old MD neighborhhood and it actually does spark outrage in me. I'm offended by it because it looks big enough for four apartments but only provides housing for one family! Seems to me that that's how you could achieve density - if houses that look like those McMansions don't bother people, build them as two or four family homes.
Oh and I agree that the addition that this post is about is not OK. There are ways they could have expanded their house that wouldn't look as objectionable or block so much light - people in my neighborhood have also expanded their houses to McMansion size by adding stories or building out into the backyard. That addition looks like they skipped the expense of an architect and did the cheapest DIY thing. I think a middle ground between suburban aesthetics and density IS possible, but that's not it.
You articulate my thoughts very well. I would be pissed. Not because of the cars, or because it is multi family but because it's ridiculously high for its location and super close to the other properties.
I am all for blending multi-family housing into single family neighborhooods. We need more housing! But some design sensitivity goes a long way towards alleviating these kinds of conflicts.
I think it's notable that it is in the side of the house, making it asymmetrical. Did the zoning code forbid an extension of the house towards the back? I wonder if a backyard building would have provoked the same backlash.
Your article has me thinking a lot about the cultural issues underlying this dilemma. I grew up just outside Worcester, MA. That city was an early adopter of zoning regs in the first few decades of the 20th century. The big target was triple deckers. The city’s full of them to this day, whether cheap tenements or versions that stacked 3k+ sq ft homes on top of each other in affluent neighborhoods. The target at the time was the cheaper, faster to market version being built by immigrants, especially Catholics, and the public language wasn’t always euphemistic. Juno to 100+ years later, Deeply embedded is this belief that once you go MF, it’s all downhill from there. Neighborhood downfall? Nobody blames the factory owners who sold their businesses oversees or the fact our economic development efforts fall short allowing places to churn out a steady stream of new business. Because our focus from day one was rooted in socially engineering those neighborhoods. Nobody wants to be a bigot, but that’s what often and historically underlies the idea of zoning exclusion in the first place.
As someone who lives in a house 6 ft. away from my neighbor, the most important thing in a situation like this is who are your actual neighbors! I could be annoyed by the structure but if they are good people, I could care less.
Well they won’t be good neighbors now!
I would say there’s a racial element at play here as well. This construction is for a multi-generational Asian family and let’s face it, many stereotypes and bigotry come with that. The other giant home you showed fits the “American” ideal or aesthetic of a large single family home with a bedroom for every child.
Just a note that the other property mentioned as a complete teardown in the neighborhood actually burned down. Not that it takes away from the very real phenomenon in Northern Virginia of demolishing older homes in favor of bigger, more McMansion-style homes, but this neighborhood has by and large not seen this kind of replacement development. It is mostly people adding on sunrooms or building out over their garages, with varying levels of commitment to the original architectural style of the homes.
I doubt the aeasthetic or parking concerns would generate anywhere near this level of outrage if we hadn't decided as a country that a vast proportion of each household's wealth would reside in property values, which could take a dive due to the extension.
I wrote about this case a few weeks ago in the context of recent research that finds that concerns about aesthetic “fit” tend to drive NIMBYism more than the pecuniary concerns of incumbent homeowners. It doesn’t challenge the fundamental problem of ossified suburbs, but it helps explain why resistance is the default to new forms.
More here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-aesthetics-of-exclusion
You’ve been hitting them out of the ball park all year, Addison, but this essay is so pitch-perfect that I even risked sharing it with my mostly NIMBY neighborhood listserv. It’s just right.
Ha, thank you! High honor!
I'll actually defend the fit of this structure. Anything looks worse when it's unfinished plywood. When it's done it will be very similar to the ugly garage with floor above of the house on the left. The only difference is the flat roof and being a bit higher. It looks huge because the house on the right is a rancher. But what will this shade? That neighbor's wide driveway and windowless garage.
Housing is transitioning across America and the zoning laws are being stressed. People assume our new house is a tear-down, but we found a vacate lot that never had a home on it. While the footprint doesn't match adjacent homes, the design is re-establishing the historical fabric. There are two parts to the solution. Zoning and Design and of course the design is subjective and unless we have a design overlay (such as a historic overlay) it can't be controlled.
What America needs is a cabinet level position called the "Architect General" to provide a design vision for the country. Of course that too will be a battle between modernist, traditionalist and utility, but at least it would create a national discourse that could filter down to the state, counties and cities.
That sounds like England's planning commission.
The last thing we need is every town looking the same because some federal bureaucrat pushed a specific type of house. I still wretch at the brutalist style federal buildings.
Without a vision look at where we are.
There was a vision. It's "build it exactly this way." That's why all the apartment buildings look the same.
Wait, in what universe do "all the apartment buildings look the same"? I live in Manhattan and even after decades here I'm still constantly impressed by the variety and sheer beauty of the thousands of residential buildings here.
So long as modernist dies I’m ok with it. There’s a modern that’s ok, but it’s the modern of 1960.
It’s just a cheaply built addition that doesn’t look like everything else in the neighborhood. If it had snazzy modern design features maybe people wouldn’t care so much, but if I were the neighbor, I would be pissed too, because it’s cheap and ugly, and clearly the builder had no consideration for the neighbor’s life, you know? It’s going to throw a huge shadow over the neighbor’s house for at least part of every day. Part of the reason I live on acreage out in the woods. My closest neighbors are a thousand yards away, and they still do things that annoy me.
The “modern farmhouse” white house with black trim look needs to die a violent death, though
As I've written before, I can't tell you how grateful I am for these essays. I'm fortunate to have spent my life alternating between a dense Manhattan neighborhood and in the area surrounding a New England town, and I continue (based on this) to love cities and countryside and to abhor suburbs.
This is (I realize) a privileged and radical position: I understand that a great majority of Americans live their lives in sprawl and developments and shop at strip malls etc. and that this is what millions of people like...but I still see them as victims of the blight of cars (as Addison keeps saying) and the business forces that have destroyed towns and hollowed out cities in order to create commute-based lives and ugly "communities" which are corporate projects with a thin veneer (literally) of Disneyland-style nostalgia for some kind of hazy fantasy of "home-ownership" that's been systematically instilled in the population at least since WWII.
I am a property owner in New York City, which means that I have invested in a living space that has no shingles, garage, lawn, fence, driveway, or any of those features of "homeownership" that are supposed to be at the heart of the American dream — but I don't think I am lacking anything. Just because I can't go mow my lawn or be surrounded by a synthetic view of identical pitched roofs out the window, doesn't make me any less a homeowner. I have neighbors and a community and nearby churches and schools and everything else that's supposed to make for a community, but I don't have to drive anywhere; I can literally walk to where the symphony orchestra plays or to Central Park or to any of dozens of neighborhood spots to eat or into parks or wherever I want to go.
And yet (especially during the past decade), I've had to listen to a clamor of fellow citizens insisting that this scenario is "a hellhole" full of "crime" and "undesirables" while my relatives in suburbs plead with me year after year to abandon all of this so that I can live in a fake-colonial "home" in the middle of acres of fake streets with fake English names (created by a committee on a drawing board) with the neighbors eyeing my suspiciously and the nearest cup of coffee or sandwich a fifteen-minute drive away.
Anyway, hopefully over the next century people will come to their senses about both cities and outlying areas and this nationwide car-based blight will be transcended.
Maybe it’s because it is super ugly.