Equity Anyone

The city does not change the tax value of a new or renovated building until the Certificate of Occupancy is issued. This means that the unsold white elephants are costing the city the proper tax value for that building, while the residents are paying higher tax value because the sale of the land beneath them has raised the land value for the neighborhood.

Sort of like people who pass the line of cars on the highway to merge at the last minute, which ironically causes the line-up in the first place.

Over on Glenwood Avenue, Garage Mahal is for sale for 2.3 mil. The building's tax value is $99,000. How much is this speculation costing the city in productive income? These constructions take years. I count at least 6 houses in the over-a-mil range that are still vacant within several blocks of fallonia-central. A teardown / rebuild could ride undervalued for 2-3 years.

Open Letter to City

Thank you for your attention to the problems of older neighborhoods at [Tuesday's] meeting. Mention was made of looking at other cities' responses. The infill proposal being considered today in Chevy Chase, Md, is attached -- it's rationale matches the concerns of many in Raleigh. It addresses the important character issue and offers incentives for builders to work within this definition.

The NCOD is a fine concept. But you may have noticed in today's meeting that neighborhood protection is a fractious issue. This makes the NCOD a much harder process on the residents. I believe the city needs act clearly and soon with minimum standards for builders "doing business" in our city. If a neighborhood wishes to add more layers of protection, then the NCOD is a great option. Imagine if Fallon Park had been able to file its NCOD last year, we might be in a different place this year ... but we were turned away. This whole effort has been very difficult on our residents.

From the Charlotte Observer, an editorial comparing Charlotte infill standards to Raleigh's (when they thought Raleigh might act on this issue first) stated: "Why should cities care if big, new houses are altering the character of urban neighborhoods? Because those neighborhoods' value is tied to their character, their mix of people and the quality of life they sustain. Lose that, and you've lost more than bungalows and streetscapes."

Just yesterday I visited neighbors on my block and found there is still much concern about both the threats to the character of the neighborhood and the re-evalautions which are inflated by these new million dollar homes on our block. Wes Minton, in the N&O, stated that "The reasons these tax values are up is due to the teardown lot values. A half acre lot is worth $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 ... If this proposal gets approved, your lot is no longer worth that." The converse of this is that our property values and taxes are affected by this land rush and the diversity of our neighborhoods is at stake as well. I have lived in my home 35 years and now face tremendous taxes based on land reevaluations based on speculative real estate activities.

I feel strongly that residents of a neighborhood should not have to take the full measure of responsibility within a township to protect their ability to live in their home. We need the City of Raleigh to take city responsibility for this issue and offer some oversight, guidance and structure. I hope this information will be useful in the coming deliberations.

- - - -

From Maryland Political Watch:

Tuesday, January 08, 2008
New Moratorium Proposed in Town of Chevy Chase

The Town of Chevy Chase will consider a new emergency building moratorium on Wednesday evening during its 7-9pm meeting. The purpose of the proposed moratorium is to stop new construction (except of additions of under 500 sq. ft.) until the Town can adopt the ordinance proposed by the Town's Land Use Committee designed to promote construction compatible with existing homes in the Town.

The crux of the proposed new ordinance is a new limit on floor-to-area ratio (F.A.R.) which allows larger homes on larger lots. The ordinance would also include new height and lot coverage restrictions beyond those already imposed by Montgomery County. The proposed ordinance also contains incentives in the form of permitting a higher F.A.R. for additions to existing homes (rather than teardowns) and for construction that meets certain environmental standards.

I favor both the moratorium and the concept behind the new ordinance. The new ordinance is complex and the Council will need time to consider it carefully and to hold public hearings on it before adoption. At the same time, I hope the Council moves expeditiously to move the process forward and enact the ordinance.

Even if the Council acts quickly on the ordinance, the moratorium is needed because the Town may continue to lose existing homes due to this delay and because the new ordinance has taken longer to enact than expected. If no new construction occurs, then no one is injured by the moratorium but Town residents will feel reassured. Supporters of the new moratorium plan to present a petition in support of it at tomorrow night's Council meeting.

The Town Council can feel safe enacting the moratorium on an emergency basis because of the long-established record in hearings and elections of support for measures like moratorium and the ordinance. This new ordinance represents the culmination of a process begun with the first moratorium.

From Chevy Chase MD Land Use Committee: extracted.
How Can The Town Regulate New Construction to Protect its Traditional Character?
Jakubiak & Associates, in consultation with Studio 27 Architecture and the Land Use Committee, is putting together a proposal designed to ensure that new construction would enhance rather than detract from the Town’s distinct, traditional character. It is recommending that the Town keep its setback laws in place and promote compatible construction by establishing limits on: (1) floor area through a Floor Area Ratio (F.A.R.), (2) height, and (3) lot coverage. Restrictions also would apply to the size of driveways and garages. Under consideration is the adoption of base F.A.R.s, combined with the opportunity to achieve additional floor area by meeting a number of specific objectives. The size of base and total F.A.R.s is still being studied.

A primary objective of this effort is to enable most residents to add onto their existing homes, as they have in the past. The town’s existing houses define its character and their retention should be encouraged. Residents and builders choosing to add on to, rather than demolish and rebuild, will be entitled to a higher base F.A.R. To promote leadership in environmental design, a higher base F.A.R. may also be available for LEED certified projects (gold or platinum). LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and certification is awarded according to the level of compliance achieved under a nationally accepted green building rating system, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

Residents or builders seeking to build even larger additions or to demolish and build a new house will be eligible for additional floor area, up to a maximum, based on an approach similar to that devised by the USGBC. Additional square footage will be awarded according to the number of points accrued by compliance with a number of items on a laundry list of character-defining and/or pro-environment features, such as limiting paving in the front yard or total lot coverage; preserving or planting new shade trees; breaking up a façade to make a larger house appear smaller; and introducing one story elements, such as a porch. Residents and builders will be able to pick whether and which specific features they want to meet.

Fallonia invites you to submit your letters to the City of Raleigh to post on this site.

Best Thing I've Heard All Week

From a comment on New Raleigh

This is America and the “get off my land” mentality is infused in our culture. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. What we have lost is the means to discuss what responsibilities we have to each other in our contract to live together as a society. -JZ

More about infill

(Fall 2003)
Infill--Having It All
by Marita H. Gilliam

Of late, the trend to infill-new residential development within established neighborhoods-is picking up speed. Developers and homeowners are racing to find attractive lots inside city limits throughout North Carolina. Suburbanites' return to city living, according to urbanists, has many motives: tree-lined streets with sidewalks, nearby shops, offices, bus stops, schools, churches, movies, and parks. An established neighborhood has all of its infrastructure intact-sewers, power, police, and fire protection. It also has old houses, front porches, alleys, and friendly, walkable neighborhoods.

So what is good infill? I think of it as building a home on a lot previously vacant or on a lot on which the previous house is an eyesore to the neighborhood. The newly built house complements that neighborhood in a variety of ways: architectural style, setback, height, bulk, and other details that make it blend in with the community. But actual infill, in many cases, falls short of this definition, such that some cities want to legislate standards.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than in Raleigh and Charlotte. In fact, Charlotte has gone so far as to develop guidelines for infill. These were written so that infill users could pattern new construction after the old. Are they in use? John Rogers, administrator for Charlotte's Historic District Commission, explains: "Although these guidelines were drafted, they were never made a formal policy by City Council." In Raleigh, citywide infill subdivision standards have been written but not enacted.

Most citizens oppose the idea of being told what to do with their property. As Raleigh senior planner, Watson Brown explains: "Individual property rights supercede all other rules." Thus, developers and owners may choose any number of architectural styles and scales for their infill houses, no matter what the established character of the neighborhood might be. Often they will tear down existing housing when vacant lots are unavailable. As long as there are statutes on the books that prohibit dictating design, except where protective covenants are in place, infill housing will cause controversy.

Hastings Drive in Charlotte is a prime example. Developed in the 1940s within walking distance to Queens College and close to downtown, Hastings is a side street to Queens Road, Charlotte's signature street, and featured one-story ranches with a driveway or a garage at the back of quarter acre lots. Twelve years ago, an interior designer found a vacant lot on Hastings and asked Bobby McAlpine, noted architect from Montgomery, Alabama, to design a home for her. He did so, and the result was the designer's dream: a stuccoed, two-story French town house with a circular drive. That infill house began a trend that has continued on Hastings. It appears that one half of its homes are now infills, achieved by tearing down existing houses. Although McAlpine's design has been softened over time as moss has stained the stucco and plantings have matured, the home, along with another town house, serve as out-of-place bookends to the ranch in between. More sympathetic design, compatible to neighboring houses, might have made these infill homes more cohesive to the neighborhood. ...

This excellent resource article can be read at Preservation North Carolina.

Raleigh Builders' Perspective on your Community

This letter is circulating as a call to arms for this Tuesday's City Council Meeting.

Despite the actions of the Raleigh Planning Commission in December, our City Council is getting ready to force something on every property owner in the City of Raleigh. If you care at all about the value of your home and property, PLEASE let your voice be heard. At the meeting of the Planning Commission in December, there may have been 50 or 60 supporters of our property rights.

It is not enough to write these people an email. You should go to the meeting! The Council has scheduled this meeting on short notice in the middle of the day so that most of us cannot be there. Forward this message to everyone in your address book. The internet is the only way to get people who care about this to stand up and defend our rights as property owners. They have NO BUSINESS telling people what size addition to put on their homes.

Currently the City of Raleigh has CAC's or Citizen Action Committees to review proposed changes in established neighborhoods. However, the City chooses not to utilize this option, as it is too hard to enforce.

Instead, they'd rather create new laws and rules to wrap around the ones they already won't enforce. I for one am sick and tired of having someone who doesn't even live in my neighborhood trying to control my home and my neighborhood. [note from FP: me too]

This effort by Councilmen Thomas Crowder and Russ Stephenson is part of an overall anti-growth message that just a few people want to send to the business community. That message is that growth is bad for Raleigh and that new homes and/or cleaning up and rebuilding old neighborhoods is bad business. This all comes just days after Wake County doubled the value of your property for tax purposes. It will take eight years for them to revalue your homes again, all the while the market value will be declining because people who want to remodel, add-on or tear-down will move to a place where adding on to or replacing old homes is welcome.

PLEASE look into this, write your city council representative, and attend the meeting on Tuesday at 1pm. Your retirement nest egg will definitely be adversely affected.

ALSO, FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!

Fallonia has tried to stay out of the fray, but this letter is over the top, so it is fair game.

Red herrings include FEAR (loss of rights, control, anti-growth) and MONEY (bad business, market value, retirement nest egg) and FREEDOM (restrict your additions or renovations, restrictive regulations). None of this is true. I was amused to see that our neighborhoods need their help in cleaning-up. Freudian slip mayhaps?

What we at OTT-ITB advocate can be summed up in this statement found at Tulsa OK's Preserve Midtown site (whose excellent resources I have been sharing this week).

What is infill?
Infill is new construction that 'fills in' empty lots in areas that are already established. Good infill should "develop seamlessly within an existing urban fabric, balancing, completing, and/or repairing the surrounding sectors." Key considerations are:

"Setback is the distance from the front facade of the house to the steet and should be the same distance as other houses on the street. Height should be compatible with the height of buildings surrounding the lot. Mass pertains to the bulk of the house. It should be similar, rather than wider or longer than its neighbors. Scale of the house's height and width should be compatible with the proportions of other homes in the block. Facade, the face of the house, should not appear flat, nor should it be dominated by a garage. Windows and Doors should emphasize the vertical, taller rather than wider. Roofs should have a pitch, or angle of roof, that is similar to others in the neighborhood."
— Glossary of Terms (The Lexicon of the New Urbanism: MCDA, Minneapolis, MN)

If you live in a neighborhood you love in Raleigh, the City Council meeting on Tuesday, January 8 at 1 pm, is vitally important to you. This weekend is the perfect time to contact your councilors and let them know your position on Infill Standards. While the matter is being studied in the Planning Department, now is the time for INTERIM measures that will protect your street from irreparable changes until this is sorted out. Please contact the city today and let them know you are concerned. Their addresses are HERE. Be sure to include your name/address/phone so they know you are a resident.

Attending the City Council Meeting is a good civics lesson. Standing room only.

Who you gonna call

from preservemidtown in Tulsa OK.

Warning Signs of a Neighborhood At Risk
Don't get caught by surprise. Some things to look out for: 1. A home is put up for sale. 2. A builder buys the home. 3. A home is needing some maintenance or looks unkept. 4. There is an empty lot. 5. After a builder buys a home, he puts it up for rent. All of these events can lead to teardowns and inappropriate infill. Sometimes, it will include a lot split: two homes are built where one once stood. Join your neighborhood association, draft a covenant with your neighbors and keep vigilant!

Posted by Preserve Midtown / 7/25/2007

So, who are you gonna call if you do not have a viable neighborhood association in your part of older Raleigh.

Let me point you to THIS.

Oklahoma is out of land?

From The Teardown Post, Tulsa Oklahoma:

What’s Wrong With the Current Trend
in New Residential Infill Development?

So, if there are buyers for these new and bigger homes on smaller lots, what’s wrong with this trend? Isn’t this just the free market at work? Many Tulsa residents say there is plenty wrong with it and the National Trust for Historic Preservation agrees with them. Indeed, in 2002, the National Trust designated “Teardowns in Historic Neighborhoods” to its list of 11 Most Endangered Places.

What are the costs of this unrestrained glut of oversized McMansions in Midtown Tulsa? Here are a few:

The fabric, character, and beauty of one of Tulsa’s greatest resources — midtown neighborhoods — are being eroded like a rapidly spreading cancer.

Some – but sadly, not all — of the oversized McMansions being built in Midtown neighborhoods may be otherwise beautiful homes in a more open setting. But crammed onto lots that are far too small to accommodate their bulk, they become unsightly and overwhelming. A good example of this phenomenon is on East 26th Street from Yorktown to Zunis.

The teardown/McMansion craze is destroying cultural and social diversity in Midtown by demolishing affordable middle class and even upper middle class homes in favor of McMansions that only the rich and near rich can afford. Take a drive through the area between East 22nd and 26th Streets and Lewis and Harvard Avenues.

The building of enormous homes on small lots cuts off air circulation and light to their more diminutive neighbors, destroys trees in the urban forest, and creates storm water run-off problems for neighboring homes.
The City loses historic housing stock that is a fundamental part of Tulsa’s history and development. Once gone….it is gone forever.

The oversized homes being built consume excessive amounts of dwindling natural resources to heat, cool, and light them, Teardowns put toxic materials like asbestos, chlordane, and lead paint into the urban air, soil, and sewer system. Teardowns and McMansions are definitely not “green.”

Those who argue that the current trend of residential infill redevelopment increases urban density and supports a more walkable, livable urban environment are ignoring the reality of the redevelopment taking place and oversimplifying what is needed to create their vision of the 21st century urban center. Replacing a more modest home with an oversized home does nothing to increase urban density, promote less use of the automobile, or add to urban livability. Houses that are built to accommodate 3 or 4 motor vehicles are merely adding to the glut of urban automobiles.

It takes infrastructure to create the 21st century walkable city, and this includes improved public transportation and the development of nearby town centers like Brookside and Cherry Street where an array of services and goods are available within walking or biking distance of neighborhoods (Form-based Codes, anyone?).

Likewise, those who assert that private property rights trump everything else still have one foot in the nineteenth century. The concept of land use zoning is itself recognition that the regulation of urban land use is necessary for orderly development. The time has come for neighborhoods to be an integral part of the land use planning that charts their own destiny – a process from which they have too long been excluded in favor of developer interests.

From preservemidtown.com.