September 30, 2005
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Fighting the Battle of the Bungalow
Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times
LIKE TOPSY A new house towers over its neighbors in Ocean City, N.J.
September 30, 2005
Fighting the Battle of the Bungalow
By JULIA LAWLOR
SOON after Brian and Barbara Illencik bought their ranch house in the seaside resort of Ocean City, N.J., in the mid-1990′s, they started a nightly ritual: “We used to sit on the back porch and wait for the moon to go across the horizon,” Mr. Illencik recalled. But five years ago, their moonlit reverie came to an abrupt end.
Just across from their backyard, a modest house was razed and a boxy three-story duplex arose in its place, blocking their view of the sky. “Now we sit on the porch at night and wait for the guy in the upstairs duplex to turn on the bathroom light,” Mr. Illencik said.
The Illenciks and their neighbors in Ocean City Homes, a suburban-style development of modest houses a short walk from the ocean, were taken by surprise when, in 2000, their long-settled neighborhood began to morph into teardown territory. Upset about the demolition of small houses to make way for tall, bulky duplexes, they organized and picketed construction sites, then herded into City Council meetings to urge restrictions on the size and height of buildings in their part of town. Eventually, new zoning rules restricted allowable height and size of houses, but not before several other duplexes had been built. “It was a rude awakening,” Mr. Illencik said. “Nobody ever thought to check the zoning rules to see if we were safe.”
Today, with the real estate boom turning coastal resorts from New Jersey to California into construction zones, a backlash is gaining strength. Longtime residents who don’t want change are fighting back, and a particular focus of their wrath is the teardown. Homeowners fear oversize mansions squeezed onto tiny lots, blocked views, clogged streets and a loss of affordability for the middle class. In some places citizens rally to try to save grand Victorian houses; in many, they defend aging bungalows.
On the other side of the battle are developers who want to get the most for their square footage, public officials interested in new tax revenue and newcomers in search of their own piece of the beach. “When you pay $1 million for a property,” said John Loeper, chairman of the Ocean City Historic Preservation Commission, “it’s hard to look at a 60-year-old building with inferior wiring and windows, no insulation, bad framing, and say, ‘Let’s save it.’ ”
Some owners who bring in the backhoes are even old neighbors themselves, replacing outdated houses.
Anti-teardown forces often learn about demolition plans before the wrecking crew arrives. They picket, circulate petitions and hire lawyers.
“We’re hearing about teardowns from more and more communities,” said Adrian Scott Fine, director of the northeast field office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “Once it starts happening, it’s really hard to slow down. Some local governments view it as progress; it’s an increase in the tax base. But it’s changing the character of the community.” In some places, he said, “the starter house no longer exists.”
So many people have asked for advice on fighting teardowns that Mr. Fine has written a guide to methods that have sometimes stopped them, like demolition moratoriums and historic districting.
On the rapidly changing 127-mile Jersey Shore, the pace of teardowns has accelerated in the last two to three years, said Ron Emrich, executive director of Preservation New Jersey, a nonprofit group in Trenton. “There is not a Jersey Shore community that isn’t having a problem,” he said.
In Beach Haven, the teardown of a large Victorian house to make way for duplexes prompted outraged citizens to form their town’s first historic preservation advisory commission last year; it can delay a teardown within the borough’s historic district for six months while a buyer is sought to restore the property.
Eighty-five miles to the south in Cape May Point, a committee hired a planning consultant last year to help it form a historic preservation commission. Joe Jordan, the chairman, said quaint cottages from the early 1900′s were being smashed to make way for big new houses. Residents of West Cape May are trying to form a similar commission, spurred by the demolition last May of the Moffitt House, built in the 1700′s.
The Illenciks’ town, Ocean City, is a seven-mile-long barrier island with a middle-class tradition and a population of 15,000 year-round and about 115,000 in summer. Some of its tightly packed bungalows, capes and old rooming houses are in disrepair, but many more are simply outdated. For at least the last seven years, according to data collected by the state Department of Community Affairs, Ocean City has given more permits for housing demolitions than any other Jersey Shore town; in 1998, 2001 and 2003, it had more housing demolitions than Newark, the state’s largest city. Between 300 and 400 Ocean City buildings have been demolished each year since 1998.
Many old houses were replaced by duplexes built as tall and as wide as the rules would allow – for example, a 1,950-square-foot duplex on a lot just 30 by 65 feet, said Jody Alessandrine, a City Council member.
“We’re getting $800,000 to $1 million of new revenue each year through taxing these new properties,” Mr. Alessandrine said. But he said he feared that Ocean City was losing its sense of community. “It’s becoming more of a place to diversify your portfolio than to live,” he said.
HOMEOWNERS are fighting back neighborhood by neighborhood. Residents of the Gardens, an area of sweeping lawns and fairly large homes, pushed for regulations – enacted last February – that outlawed roof decks and reduced the size of new buildings in their area. But they were too late to block construction of more than a dozen houses that don’t meet the new standards.
The 16-34 Community Association is fighting for similar controls in the area from 16th Street to 34th Street, which Kim Baker, a 16-34 homeowner and a retired historian and writer, said would become “the duplex farm of tomorrow” if nothing were done.
Mr. Loeper, whose commission regulates 250 properties in Ocean City’s historic district, sees development pressures as inevitable and opponents as lacking an understanding of history. “They can whine about development all they want, but this has been going on since the island was founded in 1880,” he said. “Ocean City has always been developed and redeveloped.”
For people who want to move into the new and larger houses, the antidevelopment forces can seem oppressive. Todd Lukens, a medical device salesman from Glenside, Pa., agrees with much of what the Ocean City activists are saying, but as the owner of a tiny 1920′s bungalow on St. James Place with no parking, an ancient kitchen and a tiny bathroom for his family of five, he finds himself at odds with neighbors who have pushed through new zoning laws. He would like to tear down the bungalow, which he bought five years ago, and build a three-story house with four bedrooms, three baths and a garage, but height restrictions prevent it. “I think the antidevelopment groups have gone too far,” Mr. Lukens said. “It feels un-American. For the most part, I think the new homes look lovely.”
Sometimes the forces of preservation score a spectacular success. The battle to save Ocean House, a rambling wooden seaside resort built in 1869 in the affluent Watch Hill section of Westerly, R.I., began when the community learned in March that an out-of-town developer intended to tear it down to build five houses to sell for $7 million to $10 million each. The feverish campaign of petitioning and publicity that soon followed had two goals: saving the building and preserving public access to the hotel’s prime beachfront. After several standing-room-only town meetings, another buyer was found and promised, after finding the building too ramshackle to restore, to rebuild it from the ground up. Buoyed by their success, the activists have turned their attention to saving buildings along Watch Hill’s main commercial street.
But often local homeowners find themselves in long, frustrating battles. In Rehoboth Beach, Del., a community association has been disconcerted to find its opponents turning the tactics of citizen activism to their own advantage.
Rehoboth Beach was a Methodist camp in the 1880′s and grew to a town of cedar-shingle houses and simple Cape Cods on 50-by-100-foot lots. Its small houses are now worth $1 million or more, and “they are being torn down one after the other,” said Tim Spies, who is on the board of the Rehoboth Beach Homeowners Association.
“The typical developer mentality is ‘any old house is nothing but trouble,’ ” Mr. Spies said. “You can get a permit and knock it down the same day. No architectural review committee. It’s like the wild, wild West.”
After attempts to stop the teardowns failed, this year the association decided to push for a small change – a 500-square-foot reduction on the maximum size of a new house on a typical 50-by-100-foot lot (to 3,000 square feet from 3,500). The measure narrowly passed at a rancorous town hall meeting in May.
Immediately, a group of local real estate agencies responded with their own grass-roots guerilla tactics: they hired a lawyer and, arguing that the new rule reduced the value of residents’ land, gathered signatures on petitions to force a vote on overturning it.
But when the referendum was held earlier this month, it was the preservationists who had cause to celebrate: homeowners voted by a solid margin not to overturn the new rule. The real estate lobby, for the moment at least, has given up the fight.
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