Are McMansions getting unfair tax break?

Tom Pyle, Princeton
To the editor:
At the corner of Sycamore and Riverside near my house, another McMansion is busting onto the scene. Like a nuclear-plant cooling tower, this outsized house on steroids is now inescapably evident all around, looming too large over all the capes and ranches nearby, casting a long dark shadow across the neighborhood.
   About four weeks ago, this project began with a slow stripping of the original cape on the site. The stripping got all the way down to just the chimney and a few original 2x4s. But in a week — boom! — a giant plywood box erupted as if from nowhere totally around and above the old house’s frame.
   Why wasn’t the original modest house just razed? Surely it would have been easier for the builder just to get the old house completely out of the way first. Could there be a builder-friendly municipal regulation that gives special tax treatment to the builder of a “remodel” instead of a “new build?” Are builders being permitted to perpetuate a fiction of remodeling for lower taxes while really building anew for higher profits?
   A believer in personal property rights, I don’t begrudge property owners (even speculating builders) to do as they wish on their own land. I accept that McMansions are now an unfortunate fact of Princeton life, even if I don’t like the crass, in-our-face, beggar-the-neighborhood architectural “lifestyle” expressions that some of them egotistically manifest.
   As a local taxpayer, however, I (and many others) would have a big problem with any municipal sweetheart arrangements with the builders of these whales, permitting them by some perverse incentive to pay less than their fair share of local taxes on such imaginary “remodels.”
   May I request one of our council members to explain to us constituents by a return letter to the editor what these “remodel” arrangements constitute and reassure us that special deals for “remodel” builders are not bilking our municipal treasury?
Tom Pyle
Princeton 