Supersize It

In Florida they’re called yucko stuccos. Other parts of the country refer to them as McMansions, megamansions, lot hogs, starter castles or Taj Mahals. These are the big box houses springing up all over the country courtesy of a phenomenon known as the tear-down. Just take a drive through the residential sectors of Green Hills. Sneed Road, for example, used to be a street of modest homes, a place whose quiet was broken only by the squeals of children at play and the hum of lawnmowers. Today the asphalt is stained with the muddy tracks of earth movers and cement trucks, any kid sounds drowned out by the whine of electric saws and the staccato of hammers. Sneed Road—like Wallace Lane and Trimble Road and many other similar streets—is undergoing the biggest reconstruction these parts have seen since the Yankees did their occupation bit. These streets are losing their 1940s and ’50s—and even ’60s and ’70s—housing stock in the process of what some in real estate call mansionization. There’s a straightforward, if ruthless, logic to the tear-down formula. A developer or his/her agent scouts for a smallish (1,800 to 2,000 square feet), slightly shabby, post-World War II house on a half-acre, 100-foot-wide lot. The street should have good bones—a few larger houses with some architectural character and mature trees—and lie in a neighborhood with a minimal commute to downtown and good retail. The lot size—“not too large and the deeper the better”—and frontage will give “presence” to the more palatial house to come, according to Mandy Wachtler, who’s known in real estate circles as “Queen of the Tear-Down” and represents several builders perennially hungry for sites in older neighborhoods. In Nashville, the favored tear-down territory is Zone 2: the southwest section of the real estate map lying between I-24 and I-40 that includes Green Hills, Forest Hills, Belle Meade, Hillwood and West Meade. That’s because the market for most single-family replacements for a tear-down is high end, and these areas have an upscale tradition. Within Zone 2, Green Hills has the highest priority because buyers want “a quick trip to downtown and the airport, and to the hospitals for the doctors,” Wachtler says. Belle Meade is less appealing to builders “because of all the rules and regulations. Everyone wants to be as close to the loop”—I-440—“as possible without hearing it.” According to Wachtler, the price range the scout is looking for is $300,000 to $400,000, “although the low end is becoming ‘I wish.’ ” Scouts prefer to buy from senior citizens because they are often ready to relocate to a condo, and they’re less likely to have updated their fixtures and finishes, which keeps the price down. After the sale, the builder clears the lot—a process called “scraping” or “smoothing,” which costs $7,000 to $10,000—and builds a much larger house, investing approximately three times the cost of the land. The asking price for the new house is usually 10 to 24 percent more than what the developer has paid out for land and construction. So what started out as a $400,000 property is now worth $1.3 million to $1.4 million. “The whole thing works based on the lot price,” Wachtler says. “The developer makes a good living, and the buyer gets the new house they want.” Critics of the tear-down craze characterize the perpetrators as piranhas. “But it isn’t greedy developer driven; it’s market driven,” explains Wachtler. “Real Nashvillians want to live in the older sections of town, to be near the commercial centers so they don’t have a big commute. But they don’t want to live in an 1,800-square-foot ranch with 8-foot ceilings, bland moldings and hollow core doors.’” What they do want is 9-foot ceilings—and 10 is better—a master suite on the main floor, an open plan kitchen/great room, a bath for each bedroom, spacious closets, crown moldings and a three-car garage. “It’s too expensive to renovate the ranch, bump up the roof and add on, to get all this, or even some of it,” Wachtler says. “So that means new construction.” Baby boomers, contemplating their geriatric years, “all ask for one-story plans,” according to Wachtler. And neighbors almost always prefer to avoid a two-story replacement for a one-story tear-down, to mitigate the sensation—as one disgruntled boomer puts it—that “I’m now living in the servants’ quarters of the big house.” But Wachtler counters that few lots are big enough to support a one-story house that includes all the space that buyers now demand, and costs are higher for the builder as well: a single story house requires twice the roof. “You just can’t afford to build the palatial ranch like they used to do in West Meade,” says Wachtler. “The market won’t support the extra expense.” The typical spec house—built for the open market—is 5,000 to 6,000 square feet and sells for between $1 million and $2 million. The custom version—where buyers build a new house for their own occupancy—grows even larger and costs more: $2 million to $4 million. What Wachtler calls “custom estates” are spreading their footprints on the big lots along Hillsboro Road and in Forest Hills, which are typically two acres, and in Belle Meade. The largest result of a tear-down in Nashville, according to Randy Ward, who assesses residential property for Metro in Zone 2, is a 27,667-square-foot house on Tyne Boulevard completed in 2004. Just to drop a name, Senator Bill Frist is building his own custom estate on Bowling Avenue. Frist recently announced that after his Senate term expires he’ll be returning to Nashville and “the house I grew up in.” Well, he’ll have the address of his childhood, but the home of his parents is long gone. Only the staircase was saved. The size, amenities and style of the infill McMansion are often remarkably similar to those of the Brentwood variety. Multi-gables are popular, as is the so-called “lawyer foyer” with its large chandelier on display through the pseudo-Palladian window. And the builders usually aren’t picky about mixing architectural details gleaned from many lands and periods: the irregular roof profile of the Victorian era coupled with a neo-classical column or two for example. But Wachtler points out that clients for the former “are different than those for Brentwood, where the buyer is often transient, moving from a city where they’ve gotten used to living in a subdivision and a longer commute.” By far the most controversial aspect of the tear-down phenomenon in Nashville, however, is not the single-family replacement, no matter how tall or how out of keeping with its neighbors. That distinction belongs to the duplex. “Property values are so high in Green Hills,” explains Metro Councilman Jim Shulman, who represents the 25th District, “that when developers tear down one house, they have to build two. Most of the new duplexes are very large, and are being sold for more than the surrounding single-family houses are worth.” The duplex satisfies the intense demand in the mid-range market, defined as a price tag of $400,000 to $500,000. Wachtler explains that the two-family structure is often a good first step for a builder, “to bridge the economics before you transition to single-family as you’re blending up into the bigger lots and larger existing homes on streets like Sneed and Trimble.” What’s good for the developer isn’t necessarily perceived as good for the ’hood, however. Shulman has many constituents who complain that all the new duplexes are radically altering the nature of the neighborhoods. “Many of the new duplexes are high quality homes, but they’re three to four times larger—in a single mass—than the older single-family houses, and they don’t fit in. The increased density also brings more traffic. My constituents are asking me to protect the Green Hills they bought into.” The protection strategy Shulman has employed is down-zoning, from two-family to single-family only. He says he’s passed through the Council down-zoning for over 20 neighborhoods so far, with more on the way. “It’s like a tidal wave; you could see it coming. I down-zoned one neighborhood, and then everybody wanted it.” Shulman says all his down-zoning has been criticized as harming affordable housing in Green Hills. But he makes the reverse argument: that it’s the developers who are tearing down the cheaper housing stock and “pricing people out of the market. The Planning Department has put together bills that would limit the number of duplexes on a street, but they haven’t passed because the Council is kind of split between pro-development and pro-neighborhood. Some say that down-zoning just increases the development pressure on surrounding areas, but I’m doing it because it’s the tool I have to help my district.” Shulman’s constituents are apparently less concerned about tear-downs if the big new houses are stand-alones. “I just had my first complaint—about a single-family for a lot on Sperry Avenue—last week.” Lynn Williams, who represents the 34th District, another prime tear-down territory, says her constituents are concerned about all the new single-family homes because of the changing relationship between house and yard. “Green Hills developed as a place with space between the houses,” Williams says, “whether it was a 2,000-square-foot house on a 20,000-square-foot lot, or a 4,500-square-foot house on a 40,000-square-foot lot. Now developers are putting a 6,000-square-foot house on a 20,000-square-foot lot. That’s taking the green out of the hills.” To address the issue of the single mass of the shared-wall duplex, Councilman-at-Large David Briley is tinkering with a bill that would provide incentives to detach the structures. “Some builders are using the gimmick of building a brick wall and then attaching a new house to the old one. The result is often pretty horrible.” Briley is trying to figure out a way to get some design review to consider massing, setback and maximum square footage. “I know I can’t pass any sort of blanket prescription, so I’m looking at an incentive program, in which a builder who wanted to avoid the connector wall would agree to design review,” he says. “But I’m not sure I can pass even that.” The visual impacts of the tear-down phenomenon sweeping across southwest Nashville are clear to anyone with a working eyeball. The economic impacts are less obvious, but no less real. Builders see themselves as adding value to the neighborhood when they replace a small house with a gigantic one. But what they’re ratcheting up by tear-downs is land value, not the older structure on it. When a buyer pays $400,000—or over a million as recently happened in Belle Meade—for a piece of property and then tears down the existing house, it’s essentially paying that amount for just the lot. “So what the market is saying,” according to Randy Ward, the property assessor, is that the torn down house “had minimal value.” And that affects the values of surrounding houses. One tear-down in a neighborhood doesn’t necessarily mean your house is worth nothing but the dirt it’s built on, but several tear-downs nearby certainly can, says Ward. “In Belle Meade, for example, we’ll make a list comparing what a vacant lot sold for—say $650,000—with what a tear-down property of similar lot size sold for. Most of the time, we’re not seeing much difference. So we’ll assess less for the existing houses. But that doesn’t offset the much greater assessment for the land.” Ward says rising land values have many worried about their next assessments. “I get calls every day, especially from senior citizens on fixed incomes; they’re concerned that they won’t be able to pay their property taxes.” And all the new construction can actually erode the value of fine but older houses. “A 6,000-square-foot house of the 1920s or ’30s, like you see in Belle Meade and Green Hills, even if renovated with new baths and kitchen, is still in some ways obsolete,” Wachtler explains. “It doesn’t have walk-in closets, or a great room, or a bath for every bedroom. So new construction outsells the old in some areas.” The tear-down and consequent mansionization of neighborhoods is not merely a local phenomenon, but a national one. All across the country—from the Hamptons to the Bay Area, Miami to Chicago—newspapers and online journals are covering all the demolitions. Reporters are describing how tear-downs pit old neighbors against new, preservationists against builders, the wealthy against the middle class, with local governments trapped in the middle, trying to balance property rights and boost their tax bases without alienating long-term residents. “Boom dooms old homes” thunders the online Sun-Sentinel, describing the state of affairs in Central Florida cities such as Orlando and Winter Park. Some of the homes aren’t all that old. A 2004 article in Professional Builder documents the demolition of a $525,000 eight-year-old house in Sarasota to make way for a $1.6 million new one. The online Connecticut newspaper, Westport NOW, routinely runs a “Today’s Teardown” feature. The public forum website of Rogers Park near Chicago posts a “Tear-Down Gallery” that’s updated monthly. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has devoted a series of articles to tear-downs in Buckhead and other territory inside the Perimeter, as well as the formation of the DeKalb County Infill Task Force to combat mansionization. In the Atlanta suburb of Oak Grove, irate neighbors began posting signs in the front yards of the for-sale intruders warning: “If you buy this house, you will not be welcome in our neighborhood.” The residents of the Charlotte, N.C., suburb of Sherbrooke have tried collectively to capitalize on the trend. According to The New York Times, 22 homeowners put their entire neighborhood up for sale as a single, 15-acre package. They figured that selling the land for triple the value of what the houses would bring individually was “better than being picked off one by one, and having little control over what happened next door,” as one resident explained. Reflecting the growth of a niche market, realtors and builders now advertise as tear-down experts, “our land or yours.” Xchange Properties, which deals solely with tear-downs, has offices in hot markets like Chicago, Virginia and New Jersey and has its eye on California. According to The New York Times, Xchange maintains a data base of potential buyers and sellers, eschews multiple listing services, and charges only a 2 percent commission rather than the standard realtor fee of six percent. The lower rate is enabled by the fact that properties are sold “as is” and without home showings. It’s all location, location, location. Despite the increased public attention to the phenomenon, however, the tear-down is not new. In the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale, tear-downs have averaged 100 a year since 1985. The demo pace picked up and spread to smaller metropolitan areas in the residential real estate boom of the 1990s. By 2000, The New York Times was reporting, “Last year nearly 10 percent of the 1.3 million single-family home starts nationwide were begun on lots recently cleared of existing houses.” Wachtler doesn’t see the tear-down trend as abating anytime soon in Nashville, pointing to the healthy diversity of the region’s economy. She also notes that the rise of utility costs in general should have little impact because the new McMansion is so much more energy efficient than the old ranch. “I live in a 3,900-square-foot house built in 1948, the kind where your hair blows when you stand next to the sliding doors,” Wachtler laughs. “What I paid this winter for utilities would cover the bills of a 6,000-square-foot house.” While many residents of tear-down neighborhoods object to the deconstruction, many more decry the reconstruction. They complain that the new houses are just too big, too out of scale in their contexts. One of the primary motives behind the failed push for conservation zoning overlays by some residents of the Sylvan Park and Whitland neighborhoods was the fear of tear-downs. Exhibit A on Leonard Avenue in the Whitland area is what some have nicknamed “The Bank.” The big house, whose double front porch and classical columns vaguely recall the lower garden district of New Orleans, replaced a smaller structure and sits uncomfortably in a context dominated by bungalows. Property rights advocates in both neighborhoods defeated the overlays, which would have controlled demolitions and required design review for new infill by the Metro Historic Zoning Commission. But the triumphant libertarians should view as a warning the gargantuan scale of mansionization elsewhere in the country. In March, The New York Times described the battle that had broken out in Greenwich, Conn.—where the 10,000-square-foot house is ubiquitous—over plans for an almost 39,000-square-foot, 11-bedroom number with a 224-foot-wide front facade. A subsequent article told the story of a billionaire who downsized his blueprint for a 72,000-square-foot house in Alamo, Calif., to 17,500 square feet and still failed to satisfy his millionaire neighbors in the Bryan Ranch subdivision. They promptly amended the homeowners’ covenants to restrict new houses to 10,000 square feet. Lacking the power of such covenants, other communities have enacted zoning restrictions on height and size, on the house footprint as a percentage of the lot. Palo Alto established a tree preservation ordinance that effectively limits the lot coverage in established neighborhoods. Last year the city council of Chevy Chase, Md., imposed a six-month moratorium on home demolitions, new home construction and large-scale renovations to buy time to develop ways to control mansionization. Builders and some residents attacked the moratorium as a blatant violation of property rights. Trying to limit the envelope of new construction, however, bucks a trend. This country of increasingly obese people driving obese vehicles has been growing its housing to similar proportions. In 2005 Mother Jones published these stats: • Since 1950, the average new house has increased by 1,247 square feet. Meanwhile, the average household has shrunk by one person. • In 1950, one in 100 homes had 2.5 baths or more. Today, one in two do. • One in four Americans wants at least a three-car garage. • One in five new homes is larger than 3,000 square feet—the size at which it becomes unmanageable to clean without help. • The National Association of Homebuilders’ “showcase home” for 2005 was 5,950 square feet—15 percent bigger than the 2004 model. • Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently gave a six-bedroom, seven-bath, seven-television house to a family of four. • The Unabomber’s legal defense team cited the size of his shack—10 feet by 12 feet—to buttress his insanity plea. The larger land-use impacts of tear-downs and mansionization are a subject of considerable debate among urban planners. But some risk political incorrectness to defend the practice because it discourages sprawl, according to a 2002 article in USA Today: “Some experts argue that tear-downs fulfill the principles of ‘smart growth’ because they: don’t eat up farmland and open space; lessen traffic congestion by keeping people who want big homes closer to cities where they work; revitalize older suburbs by bringing wealthy homeowners back; and encourage walking to the small downtowns, schools and parks often found in older suburbs,” writes Haya El Nasser. If people are going to build big houses either way, she continues, quoting Robert Lang of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, “you can have them do it where it does some good, or they can go on building them as they have been for years way out there where the corn grows.” That viewpoint is too big-picture for resentful residents of tear-down neighborhoods here in Nashville. “Thanks to the three-story monster now across the street from my house, I can no longer sit in my yard and watch the sun set,” says one anonymous critic. “That’s a quality-of-life issue for me.”