I think this house will be o.k.

 

It's not often my neighborhood makes the news, but last week the Board of Adjustment was called in to grant a zoning waiver to a house on my very block. The house pictured above, built in 1930, was crushed by an uprooted tree during the August 2020 derecho storm. Earlier this year, the wreckage was cleared away, and now the owners are rebuilding. The lot is 50 feet wide and 140 feet deep.

The first thing you notice about version 2.0 is the garage. The former garage was behind the house, with an alley access. Now there will be a garage that faces the street, with driveway access. This comes dangerously close to the "snout house" design I criticized in October 2016 for infill housing in Oakhill-Jackson. 

It is true that the garage is typically not the loveliest part of the house, and that no other house in our neighborhood has this feature. Even those houses nearby that have driveway access to the street have their garages behind the house. More substantively, as Daniel Herriges (2020) argues, the design creates two problems for any neighborhood: By putting the part where people live behind the garage, it takes away the "eyes on the street" that make pedestrians feel safe, and takes away the signs of human activity that make for an interesting walk.

The traditional city is a sort of social compact. It adheres to certain rules of design not because of aesthetic conformism, but because they produce an environment that is pro-social. The public realm enriches the buildings that front it, and the buildings enrich the public realm.

A front-loading garage, a blank wall, an absent or hard-to-find front door, an over-tall fence around a property: these things spit in the face of that social compact. They send the message, "My world is made up of my private space and the other private spaces I travel to and spend time in." (Herriges 2020)

There is the additional matter that this design feature is prohibited under our town's recently adopted form-based code, as we are "traditional residential-1," at least on that side of the street. (See pp. 215-216.) For that reason the plans were rejected by the Planning Commission, before they were restored on appeal to the Board of Adjustment. Why have a zoning code at all, or a Planning Commission, if we are just going to toss them out as soon as they are challenged by an experienced development team?

That having been said, I'm okay with the outcome. The design of the new house is less aggressive than a lot of the snout houses in subdivisions around our town, and as one of my neighbors noted, it will have a covered front porch and cedar shingles. As troubling as the practice of making zoning exceptions is, I'd have been very o.k. if the owners had decided to build a small store, or a bar, or "missing middle" housing, all of which our neighborhood could use, even if the form deviated from the code. Finally, the clincher is that the owners of the old house are maintaining ownership. If they'd sold the lot to a developer, I'd probably feel differently.

Meanwhile, builders are at work digging the new foundation...

...which is the most excitement our block has seen in a long time. Really, I think this house will be o.k.