Next month the Planning Board will make its first report to Town Meeting on the progress of the Large House Review Study Committee, and that report will say, “Wait till next year.” The volunteer committee has been working diligently, but the complexity of the issue and the responsibility members say they feel to fully examine the impacts and understand stakeholder interests and expectations make for a long process.
The current timeline is to continue to gather information, feedback and options for new building regulation which the committee will deliver to the Planning Board toward the end of 2025. The Planning Board will then conduct its public hearings and due diligence with an eye toward recommending revised single-family home building regulations as a Town Meeting warrant in May 2026.
“You want to take it slow,” said committee member Joe Matthews, whose citizen petition at last May’s Town Meeting led to the creation of the committee. “Something of this magnitude will affect 7,200-plus lots.”
There will be a lot of listening involved, said co-chair Moe Handel, including at least two large public meetings in June and September. “We’re trying to figure out is: What about large houses irritates people? Is it the size? Is it the style? Is it the impact it has on the fabric of the neighborhood? Is it that it’s too expensive? We have to figure out what the driving impetus is on the part of the public to deal with the ‘large house issue.’
“We’ve come up with some architectural solutions over the years,” Handel said. “But people are still discomfited by what’s happening.”
The committee’s process to date has reflected those questions. Committee members were sent to look at a range of the town’s newest houses and fill out a form detailing their thoughts about each one. Just in that limited cohort there were a range of opinions on whether a new house “fit” in Needham based on the surrounding properties, the style of the new and surrounding homes, height, setback — variables that the committee is considering as it develops recommendations.
Matthews points back to the design specification that started his petition drive: floor-to-area ratio, or FAR. Under the current regulations, only the first and second floors are counted in the FAR calculation (though full third floors are not permitted). That means builders can create homes that meet the town’s FAR-based limitations on square footage, then list the home as having more — in some cases thousands of square feet more — living space, driving up the asking price, but also making new construction profitable at all. Just a margin of $100,000 on a $3 million house can determine whether a developer thinks a property is profitable as a tear-down, committee member Bill Paulson said at one of the Large House meetings.
“The floor area should limit the size,” Matthews said. “So I think that is going to still be the essential focus — deciding on the correct definition [of FAR] and then the correct limit. But as people will see in the documents from the study committee, we are evaluating changes to the whole range of dimensional regulations. There’s floor-area ratio, there’s setbacks, there’s height, and there’s lot-area coverage.”
At the April 15 Planning Board meeting, Large House committee members Paul McGovern, Oscar Mertz, Bill Paulson, Jeanne McKnight, Moe Handel, and Planning Board chair Artie Crocker, who is also co-chair of the Large House committee, gave an update.
There is general consensus on the committee, they reported, that FAR and height are important factors in affecting building size and design. Just a foot or two of height restriction would affect the utility of attic space as additional square footage. There is interest on the committee in having any new regulations scale differently depending on lot size, replacing the current fixed ratio of foundation size to lot size with a curved formula that slightly limits options for smaller lots more than for larger ones. There is consensus that Wellesley’s system, which is less formulaic but takes much more time, investment and labor, is too cumbersome to emulate. But mostly there’s consensus that much more input and analysis is needed before the committee will feel comfortable recommending significant change.
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