Error of Destruction

“I’m really red-faced about this,” says a red-faced John Consuelo, a developer who over the past five years has managed about 50 “tear-downs”—the trade term for the practice of demolishing a smaller house and replacing it with one, two or sometimes more huge new houses on the same lot.

Critics charge that the practice alters the character of neighborhoods with out-of-scale Brobdingnagian monstrosities. Developers counter that they are simply building the kinds of houses people want.

“I guess we’re tearing down houses so fast that I kind of got mixed up about which one the crew was supposed to tear down next,” Consuelo says. “And then I had a couple approach me about putting up an environmentally sensitive 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house with a small carbon footprint, and we decided to put that on the lot we’d just accidentally cleared.”