Needham took a step toward a vote on new guidelines for single family home construction on the town’s small-to-medium lots as the Large House Review Study Committee completed its work with a final presentation to the Planning Board on Jan. 20. If adopted, the revisions would reduce the allowable new home size on 85% of Needham’s single family lots, which, said committee co-chair Moe Handel, will address the committee’s reason for being: residents’ concerns about the proliferation of new homes that loom over neighboring houses and affect the look of the town.
It will now be up to the Planning Board to assess the proposed revisions and to decide what — if any — changes are brought to Town Meeting for a vote.
The new language affects the footprint, livable space, height and setback of new construction on any of the 7,200 (of the town’s 8,414) single-family lots zoned as Single Residence B (SRB), most of which are in Needham’s more densely populated neighborhoods.
The current bylaws, adopted in 2017 after a similar process, permit much larger homes in Needham than those allowed on comparable lots in Wellesley, Lexington, Concord and Newton. The proposed guidelines would bring Needham into alignment with those towns using a set of rules intended to be easy for the building department to administer and minimize appeals to the Zoning Board of Appeals, explained committee member Oscar Mertz.
Simplicity may have been a goal, but the underlying calculations — including the financial implications — were anything but. Each change sets off a cascade of architectural math with real-world implications. For example, lowering the allowable roof height may mean that, to create livable third-floor space, architects may adjust the ceiling heights on the first and second floors.
“We didn’t want to have unintended consequences, and we wanted to have a measurable, objective process,” said Mertz during his presentation. He offered a general overview of the proposed changes, each of which would be voted on separately as individual warrants at Town Meeting.
Revise the definition of and limits on FAR
The most impactful change may be a new way to calculate the floor-to-area ratio, or FAR, along with a new, sliding scale on allowable FAR depending on the size of the lot.
FAR, the square footage of the floor space in the house relative to the size of the lot, in large part describes the bulk of the house, which was the committee’s primary focus. Although setbacks and height rules place some restrictions on total building bulk, it’s FAR that keeps builders from extending new homes deep into backyard space and encourages creative room sizing with jut-outs and eaves rather than large, unbroken blocks of wall.
The town’s 2017 definition of FAR did not include attics, though those are often partly living space, or garages, which add bulk, or basement areas that are largely above ground and therefore effectively another floor. And it was a fixed ratio for lots under 12,000 square feet and another for those larger than 12,000 square feet.
The proposed revision includes those spaces, which committee members say is a more realistic reflection of building “bulk.” It also creates a sliding scale for FAR, based on the size of the property. Smaller properties would have a slightly larger proportional FAR than larger properties (all still within the SRB zones), so that the limits on the biggest SRB lots don’t lead to homes on the smallest lots that are aberrations in the Needham market. Stringent limits for small properties, the thinking goes, might be good for economic diversity but could significantly lower the value of the property for existing owners.
The final aspect of the proposed FAR changes — an allowance of 300 square feet of attic space that will not count against the total FAR — was proposed late in the committee’s process. “I don’t want to get into the weeds,” said Mertz, pointing to one of the dense charts of impacts of different formulas applied on different lot sizes. He showed how the attic allowance would encourage the use of attic space without significantly compromising room sizes on the floors below.
Create a sliding scale for lot coverage
Like FAR, limiting the proportion of built to unbuilt space on a lot helps limit the bulk of buildings. The committee’s research, however, showed that many of Needham’s new homes — even those with high square footage or FARs that reach the current maximum — do not reach the current limits on lot coverage, which is why FAR is the more significant change. The proposed new rules would again create a sliding scale that allows a higher percentage of lot coverage on smaller lots than on larger ones.
Set a new maximum height
The proposed bylaw lowers the maximum height of a new home by 2 feet. The committee’s architects and builders say this will be more visually in line with existing homes, and it will also encourage more varied use of interior ceiling heights. One impactful height change might be the proposed limit on allowable side yard height. Builders will not be allowed to have three stories of solid wall facing the side of the adjacent house; they will have to break up that side of the building with setbacks, jut-outs, gables, or similar features to prevent the neighbors from facing a looming monolith.
Consider average setback on a block
This proposed change would preserve the character of older blocks. Older Needham houses tend to have larger front lawns than new ones do. And, although some blocks have already been altered by new houses built at the 20-foot setback, there are other blocks on which the homes are still set back 30 feet or more, creating a more traditional streetscape. The proposed change to the 20-foot setback regulation would look at the average setback of the homes within 200 feet of the new construction and, if the average is greater than 20 feet, setback of the new home would have to be the higher number.
Consequences, intended and unintended
Members of the Planning Board were effusive in their thanks for the hard work of the 13 large house committee members and the town staffers, Director of Planning and Community Development Lee Newman and Assistant Town Planner Alex Clee, who provided much of the support and helped draft the proposed bylaws — altogether more than a year of meetings, managing consultants, talking with other towns, inviting public comment, looking at data and building plans and endlessly conceiving and revising formulas. Even then, the final vote to bring this version to the Planning Board was 10-3.
Although it will be up to the Planning Board to review the committee’s suggestions in depth before bringing them — or an iteration of them — to Town Meeting this spring, some Planning Board members immediately began asking about the consequences, intended and unintended. Member Eric Greenberg mused about ways an architect or builder could end-run the new regulations. Would a rooftop box of a room technically meet the rules but be (subjectively) less attractive than the homes that are being built now?
Member Adam Block voiced his doubt about part of the market analysis, which concluded that allowable size reductions would only have a small (in the neighborhood of 5%) impact on the sale price of an existing home destined to be a teardown. Developers, the analysis suggested, would keep paying because of Needham’s desirability, and saving some construction time and cost could allow them to keep similar profit margins.
In response, Handel essentially suggested that it’s all the Planning Board’s work to determine now. Personally, Handel said, “I think people will buy into Needham even if they have one less closet.”
Although the changes would be impactful, there will still be large, expensive homes built on Needham’s smaller lots, and some would be exactly what got built over the past few years. If the proposed rules had been in effect since 2022, the committee’s analysis showed, 30% of the 182 houses actually constructed would have met the guidelines. Of the 127 houses that would have required adjustments, 46 would have had to be more than 15% smaller.
What happens now?
The Planning Board will review, seek public comment, and perhaps revise the proposed changes before voting on whether to add them to the warrant when Town Meeting votes in May.
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