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This article was submitted to the City Council by Martin Dreiling
From: The Practice of New Urbanism [mailto:PRO-URB@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of John Hooker Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 10:59 AM To: PRO-URB@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: How big is too big? - Atlanta
Otis White’s Urban Notebook www.governing.com
How Big Is Your Faceprint? Measuring McMansions
In the debate over urban teardowns, where developers knock down 1,500-square-foot houses to build 4,500-square-foot McMansions, there are two big questions: Is there anything wrong with replacing older small houses with newer big ones? And if there is, how big is too big? Atlanta is the latest city to debate the first question and, intriguingly, may have found an answer to the second.
About teardowns: This is a national phenomenon, and it’s easy to see why neighborhood activists are irked by it. Who wants to live in a neighborhood for years only to see some rich jerk tear down the bungalow next door and put up a three-story monstrosity that leaves your house in perpetual shadows?
But cities should be cautious about legislating against teardowns. Why? Because it’s a good sign that rich jerks want to move into older urban neighborhoods. Another reason for caution: For reasons not entirely Americans need more elbow room than they did in the past. The typical new house 30 years ago was 1,660 square feet; the average size today is 2,412 square feet - 45 percent larger even as households were getting smaller. Bottom line: The houses in most older urban neighborhoods aren’t big enough for today’s families.
OK, then, some teardowns are justified, and an increase in the size of houses is reasonable. But surely some new houses are wildly out of scale with those around them, right? Probably, but what does "out of scale" mean? This is where Atlanta may have made a contribution to the debate.
Atlanta’s chief crusader against McMansions is city council member Mary Norwood, who has been on a tear about teardowns since she was elected four years ago. In 2003, she persuaded the city council to set up an "infill housing task force" and commission a study by a pair of professors at Georgia Tech, among other things, to establish a measurement of neighborhood scale.
It wasn’t easy. First, the academics found, there were no objective measures that could be used in judging whether a proposed house was too big. Square footage alone wouldn’t do, they said in their paper (click here to view it). A house that’s narrow but deep, they wrote, might fit nicely with its neighbors. "On the other hand," they added, "taking the same square footage and bringing it to the front of the lot, and making it tall and making it wide would exaggerate its scale" - and, thus, stand out like a sore thumb.
So if you can’t judge a house by its square footage, how could you judge it? The Georgia Tech professors suggested two new measures: the "faceprint," or how large it appears in a photo taken from the curb, and the "observed building height," or how tall it appears from the same perspective. By mapping the two measures with computer graphics programs and multiplying them, you arrive at what the academics think is an objective measurement of scale: the "weighted faceprint." Then you go up and down the block photographing and mapping the other houses. The difference between the average weighted faceprint of the block and the weighted faceprint of the proposed house will tell you if it’s out of whack.
And there are just such places, they found. When they looked at one block, the academics found that the average weighted faceprint of older houses was between 1.73 and 2.70. Then there was the McMansion, which was 8.95 - "clearly different in its measured scale than its neighboring structures."
Footnote: The Georgia Tech measurements don’t tell you whether a weighted faceprint that’s more than three times as great as its neighbors is too much, but it does offer an objective measurement for such judgments. It also suggests a way to make McMansions less objectionable: Make them narrow and deep, not tall and wide.
Posted Jan. 24, 2006
