'Snout' homes are just fine in Cedar Rapids, says council committee

CEDAR RAPIDS - No one at City Hall is going to impose any new design standards that tell home-builders how to better design houses, says Monica Vernon, chairwoman of the City Council's Development Committee.

Vernon said Tuesday that the three-member committee this week rejected a recommendation by the city's planning staff to adopt a standard that would require builders to limit the impact of a garage on the front of new single-family homes and duplexes.

The garage-dominated homes are known as "snout" houses in the development community nationwide.

In rejecting the recommendation on garages, Vernon said the committee - council committees recommend and reject proposals before they get to the full, nine member council - has decided, instead, to focus its work on adopting "minimum" building design standards for commercial buildings. Builders coming to Cedar Rapids will need to build attractive buildings like the ones required in "progressive, growing, nice" cities that have commercial design standards in place.

By way of example, she said she was excited about the prospect of Kohl's adding a store on the city's west side, but she added that the city does not have minimum design standards in place that would require Kohl's to build a store similar to its store in West Des Moines. More specifically, stores like Kohl's would have to use architectural features to break up long, blank, exterior walls on the sides and back of the store under the city's proposed design standards for commercial buildings.

"Because we don't have design standards in place, we are not able to ask them to build as nice a building as what they built in West Des Moines," Vernon said. "We're certainly not asking for anything more than anybody else. But certainly buildings in Cedar Rapids should be on a par with other places in the country.

Vernon noted that council member Chuck Swore, a member of the council's Development Committee, expressed concern that insisting on too many standards would prevent companies from investing and building here. But she said the developers she has talked to do not see the proposed new commercial design standards as overly "stringent" or ones that would create "a hardship."

Developers, though, have pushed back on the proposed standard on residential garages, which Kyle Skogman, president of Skogman Homes, and Jim Sattler, president of Jim Sattler Inc. Custom Homes, recently said did not make sense.

Planners in the city's Community Development Department had proposed a design standard in which builders in the future could not let a garage extend more than 12 feet closer to the street than the front of the house and could not build a garage the width of which exceeded 50 percent of the width of the house's facade. The planners modified an earlier draft proposal that would have prohibited garages from extending closer to the street than the front of the house.

The city of Marion has been studying design standards for snout homes, but Tom Treharne, the city's planning and development director, said on Tuesday that his office is focusing on a new city sign ordinance as it works on the garage issue.

Back in 2005, the city of Iowa City took on "garage-dominated street-scapes" and created a standard that says garages cannot exceed 60 percent of the width of a house on lots of less than 60 feet in width.

Vernon said she was less interested in new residential design standards than in new commercial design standards.

"You have to take one step at a time," she said. "It takes a whole lot more thought in terms of residential. That gets into people's taste. I think it's just a little bit more of a personal feel, and I just think we have to be careful. … I think each homeowner will buy what they like."