PACKET EDITORIAL, May 2
By: Packet Editorial
With every one-story house that gets bulldozed into oblivion on a shady suburban lot, with every grove of trees that’s displaced by a cinderblock foundation and a massive matrix of lumber, with every new pothole that grows into a crater on a once-quiet street lined with backhoes, the patience of Princetonians wears thinner and thinner.
The McMansions are here and they are here with a vengeance.
Last Friday, we reported on one in particular dubbed the "McMansion on a mound" that has neighbors sizzling in the Littlebrook area of Princeton Township. This 6,005-square-foot behemoth, under construction at the spot where North Littlebrook Road meets Magnolia Lane, is hardly a novelty in the immediate neighborhood there’s another gigantic new home just down the street, and a few more around the corner on Littlebrook. But this one happens to sit atop a pile of fresh fill, rendering its immediate neighbors, in the words of Environmental Commission Chairman David Breithaupt, "suddenly made to look like serfs living beneath a castle."
The project’s manager, Kyle Burke, did his firm, KP Burke Builders LLC, no favors when he told Packet staff writer Kara Fitzpatrick that critics of the Littlebrook home are "typical Princeton people not wanting change." Homes in the nearby Clover Lane/Deer Path Road neighborhood, he said, are "not marketable," adding that an effort by homeowners in that neighborhood to preserve their smaller homes by having the area designated as historic would "drastically reduce property values in the area."
"No one wants to live in a 2,000-square-foot, one-story house," Mr. Burke declared.
As three letters to the editor on this page attest, Mr. Burke’s view of the real estate market in Princeton is not universally shared. But it does appear to be shared by many property owners, speculators and developers who routinely file plans with the borough and township zoning offices that push every numerical standard front- and side-yard setbacks, impervious surface coverage, floor-to-area ratio, and many more to the last decimal place.
The township zoning board, for example, recently approved a 4,900-square-foot home on a lot of less than half an acre at the corner of Princeton-Kingston Road and Prospect Avenue. The new, two-story home met the exact limit of the permitted FAR as long as a massive third-story attic was not included in the calculation. Plans for the attic show three dormers in the front and two in the back, as well as two Palladian windows on one side and one on the other but because the plans show no interior stairway leading to it, the square footage of the attic is not considered living space, and therefore does not count toward the FAR.
Although it almost goes without saying that such a stairway will be added after the home is sold and occupied, and although neighbors voiced objections, arguing that such a huge structure on such a small lot would be completely out of character with the neighborhood, zoning board members said they had no choice but to approve the application.
Like the "McMansion on a mound," this case illustrates how difficult it is to regulate the size of homes on residential lots. The Princeton Borough Council wrestled with an ordinance to set appropriate limits for more than two years before finally approving one last week but nobody thinks it’s perfect, nor does anyone pretend that it will halt the proliferation of McMansions. And, while we sympathize with the Clover Lane/Deer Path Road residents, carving out a neighborhood and designating it as historic is not the most appropriate way to regulate growth and development nor is it necessarily fair to property owners who are looking to maximize the return on their investment.
Somewhere, there has to be a balance between what the market will bear and what the community wants. Clearly, that balance has not yet been achieved.