How big is too big?

As more homes are torn down to make way for bigger dwellings, some bemoan the loss of affordable housing and the changes in neighborhood character

Bobby Wieland was coy about the future of his wife's childhood home in Raleigh as shoppers wandered through his mother-in-law's recent estate sale.

Not until he had a longer chat with a couple of Pine Drive neighbors did he open up and tell them that he had bought the 48-year-old ranch with plans to raze it and build a two-story, 4,100-square-foot house in its place. The new house will sit in a neighborhood, which until recently, was filled with modest ranches and low-rent apartments. Down the street, the apartments are being demolished to make way for homes starting in the $700,000s.

The conversations were friendly, Wieland said. But it easily could have gone the other way.

A group of neighbors wants to limit the kinds of homes that could be built on 140 properties in the Fallon Park area, including Wieland's. So far, roughly half of the property owners have signed a petition in support of rezoning.

"There's a lot of tension in this neighborhood," said Wieland, who will live in the new home with his wife and mother-in-law.

Teardowns, knockdowns, bash and builds. By any name, razing old homes and replacing them with new, usually larger, ones, is sparking passionate debate across the country, pitting neighbor against neighbor.

Some welcome the infusion of big, modern, high-value houses into neighborhoods filled with small, decades-old dwellings. Others say vintage neighborhoods are being destroyed, with once tree-filled sites now nothing more than pads for McMansions that stretch the limits of height and yard space.

But the debate about how big is too big goes far beyond that, touching on concerns about property values, lifestyle, environmental effects, affordability and sprawl.

Raleigh is spending about $60,000 to hire a full-time, professional planner to focus, in part, on those issues and possible regulations on teardowns. This weekend, Raleigh's annual Neighborhood Exchange included a workshop on the issue.

"There should be reasonable limitations on new houses in existing neighborhoods," Mayor Charles Meeker said. "While teardowns are appropriate in many circumstances, the new home should have a reasonable scale in relation to the other houses nearby."

As part of a larger study, Wake County has asked a consultant to track how much affordable housing has been lost. Several apartment complexes have been razed to make way for high-priced homes or developments, including the 194-unit Whitaker Park off Pine Drive and the North Hills Terrace apartments.

The county report is expected this fall. At last count, Wake needed about 25,500 units to satisfy the demand for low-cost housing.

Griff Gatewood -- of CASA, which manages and develops affordable housing in Wake -- said a neighborhood loses when certain kinds of housing are pushed out.

"When you think about those teardowns happening, you're changing the fabric of your street," Gatewood said. "You don't have the same scale or interactions. And boy, when your parents get to be the age when they have to move, isn't it nice there's a little duplex around the corner that they can move into?"

The issue is so sticky that groups with a stake in the debate as varied as the Sierra Club and the Raleigh Regional Association of Realtors have shied away from public stands on teardowns.

"There's so much nuance and complexity to this story," said Tim Frank, a senior policy adviser for the Sierra Club, the environmental group.

Middle-class worries

The concerns about teardowns are reminiscent of those surrounding urban renewal campaigns, in which homes in predominantly poor, black neighborhoods were razed and replaced, ushering in a wave of newcomers, higher property values and steeper tax bills.