Growth Carves Suburbs Into Odd Lots
Patterns Promise Future Fights, Officials Say

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post
Monday, September 15, 2003

The proposed Giles Glenn subdivision fits together with the precision, if not the logic, of a jigsaw puzzle.

The 10-acre site in southern Fairfax County has been carved up carefully to accommodate eight single-family homes. But because not all of the land is developable, and because planners wanted to make the most of what they had while meeting suburban standards for lot size and width, a peculiar geometry has taken shape.

The front yards of Giles Glenn are in one place, while the back yards lie 200 feet or more away, connected to the former by a thread of land in some cases. Similarly, some of the side yards are another 200 feet or so to the west.

The three-headed lots have raised eyebrows in some quarters and, in others, admiration over the planners' creativity.

"To be honest, this is probably the worst example I've ever seen," said Lorrie E. Kirst, a deputy zoning administrator for the county.

But strange as they seem, the lots do operate under a certain suburban-style common sense: With land scarce and prices continuing to soar -- a single acre can fetch $250,000 or more -- developers are going to unusual lengths to squeeze the most they can out of any given parcel while still complying with the thicket of local rules governing acreage, street frontage and lot widths.

Giles Glenn's planners could have settled for one or two fewer lots to reduce, if not eliminate, the scattershot appearance, but economically that made no sense.
"Why would you give away a quarter of a million dollars?" asked Matt Marshall of Land Design Consultants in Manassas, which drew the plan. "We're not dummies. We're trying to maximize dollars."

The proposal has been filed with Fairfax County and is undergoing staff review. Like many other unorthodox land plans, it appears to meet all county regulations, officials said.
Even so, a welter of concern is arising among critics who argue that the peculiar lot shapes will give rise to everything from feuds over maintenance -- whose lot is where? -- to problems defining the appropriate places for decks, sheds, play sets and other additions. The rules for such items turn on notions of front yard, back yard and side yard, all of which can be difficult to define on a convoluted lot.

"I can't fathom having my neighbor's front yard in my back yard, when his house is across the street," said Fairfax Supervisor T. Dana Kauffman (D-Lee), who has asked for tighter rules governing lot layouts. "These bizarre lots could meet the letter, but they in no way meet the intent of the law. They simply allow developers to jam more lots onto a piece of land."

"What is creative in one person's mind is, in another person's mind, a potential eyesore," said Doug Fahl, executive vice president at Dewberry & Davis, one of Northern Virginia's largest development engineering firms.

"This is going to become more of an issue where land is scarce, and most of the time it's going to be an aesthetic issue."

He argued that the rules, however, must allow flexibility while as much as possible avoiding the potential for disputes and confusion over property lines.

One typical problem that arises in such situations is that one family's well-tended front yard abuts someone else's back yard, which, as a traditionally more private space, might be filled with swing sets, sandboxes, sheds and other family flotsam.

Just such a situation has been a source of rancor for some neighbors in the Hickory Hills section of Oakton, where an unusual lot layout has resulted in one family erecting a playground -- three swings, a ladder, slide and picnic table -- directly in front of their neighbor's house.

"A monstrosity," said the neighbor, Joan Goertz, while acknowledging that "what they've done is perfectly legal."

Jon and Nicole Dudas, owners of the house with the playground, did not respond to several calls seeking comment.

The irony of the situation, Goertz said, is that county rules permit her neighbors to put a swing set in front of her house but forbid her from doing the same thing. That's because the area is considered her front yard and their side yard.

"The zoning doesn't really cover you in a case like this," she said.

Planners elsewhere in the region, particularly in such places as Arlington and Montgomery counties, where land is scarce and pricey, report seeing more "creative" approaches to laying out lots.

Reviewers are seeing "some unique suggestions," said Rich Weaver, senior planner for Montgomery's planning department. "There is pressure to squeeze more lots out of a property. It's just dollars and cents."

Some Fairfax officials, noting some confounding configurations, say they believe that the rules might be too permissive.

They point to a narrow, two-headed lot on Waples Crest Court near Fair Oaks, where a new $1.2 million house sits hundreds of feet away from its street frontage, and a similarly strange lot in a luxury-home neighborhood off Georgetown Pike in the northern part of the county.

The Giles Glenn plan, though, might be the most extreme case, they said. The 10-acre property off Hooes Road is zoned for one home per acre. It isn't an easy site to develop, however. A flood plain, steep slopes and other features make much of the land unbuildable, and there's not enough street frontage. Even so, the plan manages to get eight lots from the site.

The owners of the property, William and Mary Oehrlein, referred questions about the design to the Manassas firm that drew it. But Marshall declined to elaborate on the strategy behind the plan.

Fairfax regulators nevertheless say it's easy to see why the planners drew such strange lots in Giles Glenn. Primarily, they were attempting to meet county requirements for minimum lot width, lot area, road access and street frontage.

For example, the county essentially requires each lot in the area to have 150 feet of street frontage. A developer can build a road to create street frontage, but that consumes valuable land.

Giles Glenn's planner opted to put its houses around a small cul-de-sac that's not long enough to give each of the eight lots frontage.

To remedy that, some lots on the north side of the property have frontage on adjoining Talbert Road, which shows up on maps but hasn't been built. Three of the lots have a third far-flung appendage, in part at least to meet minimum lot-size criteria, county officials said.
Under direction from the Board of County Supervisors, county staff members are reconsidering the rules for lot definitions.

"I do have to give the engineer credit for creatively squeezing all those lots in there," said Kirst, the deputy zoning administrator, of the Giles Glenn plan. But, she noted, "it may be difficult in the future for property owners to use their property -- or even know where it is."

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