East Hampton will bring new house size limit to the public next month

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The East Hampton Town Board will hold a second public hearing on its proposal for a new restriction on residential houses intended to reduce the amount of square footage that can be built on properties throughout the town.

Since the last well attended public hearing on the proposal in January, the Town Board has agreed to ease the proposed rule somewhat, adding 600 square feet to the new limits, which restricts square footage according to the size of the underlying property.

The new formula, which will be on the agenda at the Town Board’s June 19 meeting, will limit the interior living area of houses, known as gross floor area, or GFA, to no more than 12 percent of the total underlying lot area, plus 1,600 square feet.

The initial proposed formula capped houses at 12 percent of lot area plus 1,000 square feet.

At the January public hearing, critics blasted the law as unfairly restrictive on property owners. Some said the restriction, which would have capped house size at about 3,600 square feet for a half-acre property, would prevent them from expanding their homes as their families grew. Others said the law would hurt property values because, as one real estate agent put it: potential buyers “are not willing to live in a house that is only 3,500 square feet.”

The original formula cut the amount of development allowed on most properties by more than half, and by more than 70 percent on some lots. With the additional 600 square feet now proposed, the cuts in development envelopes on lots of a half-acre or less is still about 50 percent on lots under one acre but is only about a 30-percent reduction from the size of the largest homes commonly built on properties that size.

“On a builders half-acre, which is 20,000 square feet, you will be allowed a 4,000-square-foot house,” Supervisor Bill McGintee said this week. “We felt that is an appropriate size restriction for that size property and it certainly is more than adequate for a family to live in.”

Current zoning restrictions would allow a house of some 8,000 square feet on a full half-acre property (about 22,000 square feet). Larger lots would be less affected by the law because other building restrictions usually come into play before the GFA formula is maxed out.

The law was proposed by the Town Board after years of lobbying by residents of Amagansett and Montauk who said that new tastes in development and the attempts by speculative developers to maximize profits by stretching building envelopes to their limits were changing the character of historic neighborhoods.

At a recent board work session, some board members said they would like to see the restrictions tightened even further. Councilman Brad Loewen pointed to a house in Amagansett on a half acre parcel that is on the market for $6 million. He said that he worried that houses of the size that would still be allowed under the law would continue to slowly price middle-class residents out of the already daunting housing market. Small lots of less than half an acre are the only chance most middle-class residents still have to purchase a house.

Councilman Pete Hammerle agreed that the formula should be tightened, possibly even more than the original 12 percent plus 1,000 square feet proposal.

East Hampton Village adopted a similar law several years ago limiting houses to 10 percent of lot area plus 1,000 square feet. Two other East End villages have adopted GFA-based building restrictions as well. East Hampton would be the first East End community to adopt the limits on a town-wide basis. Only Southampton Village’s much debated and still heavily criticized GFA law is less stringent than East Hampton’s. The Southampton Village architectural review board recently lost a court case for its refusal to approve a 120-foot-wide house that meets Southampton’s GFA restriction.

East Hampton’s GFA law was drafted by a committee of town officials and building industry representatives appointed by the supervisor. The committee met in private over the last six months, despite requests by some of the organized opposition members to be included in the meetings.

Supervisor McGintee said that he is confident that the new proposal will meet the needs of growing families in the town and still prevent profit-driven development from changing the face of local neighborhoods. He said the committee will continue to meet to discuss other ways of reducing the appearance of largesse in house size through architectural designs.

“The committee is very happy with this law and I think the community will be too,” Mr. McGintee said of the upcoming amendment.

A group of residents opposing the amendment formed a grassroots organization that calls itself East Hampton Citizens for Fairness in Zoning. They have consistently criticized the law, the roots of its creation and the process by which it has been drafted and reviewed. The group has lobbied Town Board members at several public meetings to tweak the law to reduce the restrictions and were expected to turn out in force for this Friday’s Town Board meeting.