Edina tries to tame its housing monster

In Edina, where debate over monster houses has spurred protests and petitions, new proposals to limit house sizes could give the city some of the most restrictive regulations in the Twin Cities area.

In May, the City Council is expected to consider limiting square footage of houses and garages based on lot size. Roof heights would be capped at 35 to 40 feet, based on lot size.

Whether the proposed changes will be enough to quiet critics of big houses remains to be seen. Cary Teague, the city's planning director, said the staff proposals are an attempt to balance neighborhood concerns with those of builders and homeowners who want to redevelop property.

"This is a little more than the tweaks that we've made in the past," Teague said. "This is going a little further."

In December, after a public outcry over the size of some new houses, council members briefly considered imposing a moratorium on house tear-downs. Instead, they asked city staff to consider ways to prevent construction of monster houses that loom over neighbors or look out of place on blocks of more modest houses.

City staff hired a Minneapolis firm that used three-dimensional computer modeling to allow planners to see how changes in regulations would modify actual large new houses in relation to houses on either side.

"It was pretty impressive and neat to see how even minor changes and some of the changes we've already made to ordinances have an impact," Teague said.

The new proposal to control house size would use a sliding-scale floor area ratio (FAR), limiting the size of above-ground house and garage square footage based on lot size. On lots 50 feet wide or less, total combined square footage could cover half the lot. On lots 75 feet wide or more, square footage would be limited to 40 percent of the lot.

The proposal is an attempt to impose some uniformity in a city that sometimes has wildly different lot sizes on the same street, Teague said. "That's the struggle here. We have some lots that are 120 feet deep and right across the street there's one that's 300 feet deep."

If FAR restrictions had been in effect, some recently built big houses would have shrunk by roughly 8 to 10 percent. For example, a new house and garage at 5308 Oaklawn Av., where neighbors mounted a campaign against the structures before they went up, would have been cut in size from 4,163 to 3,772 square feet.

FAR rules also could affect some existing houses. Teague said a random survey of 104 houses on the east side of the Country Club district showed that eight would be nonconforming under the new ordinance.

It's up to the city's Planning Commission and City Council whether to make some kind of exception for those houses, he said.

The proposals have gone to the Planning Commission, which will forward recommendations to the council.

An Edina survey of 16 Twin Cities communities indicates that if the proposals were approved, Edina and Minneapolis probably would have the most restrictive regulations for single-family house redevelopment in the area.