Rehoboth cinches large homes with tightened zoning law

Rehoboth Beach's elected officials sharply tightened limits on home sizes in hopes of constraining the growth of the large-group vacation rental market, but held off on a companion ordinance that would have had homebuilders carefully tallying up toilets.

The Rehoboth Beach Commissioners had put two ordinances up for discussion in a Friday public hearing. One increased the number of required parking spaces off the street for homes designed with more than three toilets; a five-toilet home, for example, would need to shoehorn four parking spaces onto its lot. The commissioners chose to delay a vote on that toilet-parking nexus until August at the earliest.

The second ordinance contained a laundry list of tweaks to the zoning code to increase rear-yard setbacks, require more green space in front yards and cap the size of residential homes at 6,000 square feet in some zones and 4,500 square feet in others. That ordinance passed in a 6-1 vote, with Commissioner Kathy McGuiness voting no.

With the ordinance passed, 50 percent of the area in lots where new or vastly remodeled homes are sited in Rehoboth will have to remain natural and unbuilt – lawns, trees, garden beds. The previous requirement had been for 40 percent of lots to have natural cover.

"We will be making changes to it," Commissioner Bill Sargent said of the ordinance. "But in total it is so much better than what we have today."

Mayor Sam Cooper and some other commissioners say they have been implored to act by residents concerned about large groups of renters, noise around outdoor pools, and parking crunches. Supporters of the ordinances urged the commissioners to approve both of them, calling them the natural culmination of months of work to manage development trends in Rehoboth.

"They're nice houses owned by nice people, but sometimes you'll see 15 cars parked in front of them," said John Hughes, 74, a lifelong Rehoboth Beach resident, of the bulked-up homes in his neighborhood. "I think that's destructive to our neighborhood values. I think that's short-term prosperity at the expense of long-term prosperity. We've got something here; don't give it away to speculators. They don't look past the next sale."

People who spoke critically of the ordinances, meanwhile, said the commissioners were blind to the real-world impacts of the changes they would bring.

"You're taking porches away; you're taking patios away. People are going to give up what they're not sleeping, eating and bathing in," said Brian Barry, a contractor who builds houses in Rehoboth.

If the laws passed, Barry said during the public hearing, clients wanting six-bedroom homes would come to settle on boxy designs with driveways on both sides of the property.

"Why are we being forced to build something that is unattractive?" Barry said. "It's a foolish ordinance."

A homeowner of 22 years, Barbara Collins, said she had been working with a designer for a year on a five-bed, four-and-a-half-bath home to replace her cottage, built in 1904. The planned home would look modest – "it's not a McMansion," she told the commissioners – and her property would have a bigger backyard than it does now.

But because Rehoboth staff could not approve building permits for homes that would violate the proposed zoning laws once they had been introduced for possible passage, Collins said, her plans have been sidelined. "Three weeks ago it would have passed in a heartbeat. Now I've wasted a year with my designer and $13,000," Collins said.

She urged the commissioners to vote down the zoning changes; more than a dozen other people who spoke up at the meeting urged the same, in the name of preserving property rights.

But a Stockley Street resident, Lou Boghosian, who spoke in favor of the zoning ordinances, said they were a needed check against the influence of property investors, whom some accused of building "mini-hotels" in the guise of houses.

"They want to protect their portfolios. We want to protect the character of Rehoboth Beach," Boghosian said.

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.