City Adopts New Hillside Restrictions : Development: The rules limit square footage and heights of homes and walls. Applicants who filed before Tuesday fall under the old code.

A small group of property owners, including an applicant who wants to build a 50,000-square-foot house, pleaded with the Beverly Hills City Council on Tuesday to honor building applications already on file before approving new development restrictions for the Hillside District of the city.

In a 4-1 vote, the council approved a building ordinance that has been four years in the making. Councilman Thomas Levyn cast the lone dissenting vote.

The Hillside District comprises about 540 acres north of Sunset Boulevard. The ordinance does not apply to Trousdale Estates, which already has development standards set in code in 1987.

The new law eliminates much of the case-by-case review of projects by the Planning Commission by spelling out in the City Code limitations on building height, size, grading and tree removal.

The council did, however, allow property owners who had completed their applications before Tuesday to have their projects evaluated under the existing ordinance.

Among the projects that got in under the wire was the proposed 50,000-square-foot home at 1146 Tower Road, whose owners were not identified by city officials. The project, more than 30 times the size of a standard 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom Los Angeles tract house, is still subject to Planning Commission review.

The new ordinance regulates the size of homes based on the size of the lot but allows a minimum home size of 4,500 square feet, regardless of the size of the lot. Homes to be built on lots of more than two acres must automatically be reviewed by the Planning Commission. The law also limits building heights. Current code allows a maximum height of 28 to 32 feet, based on the size of the lot. Under the new ordinance, homes can be built to a maximum height of 30 feet on flat lots and 22 feet on slopes.

The ordinance also restricts the height of walls to three to six feet in the front yard and seven feet on side and rear yards.

Property owners can determine their rights by looking at the ordinance, said Meralee Goldman, a former planning commissioner who spearheaded the effort to develop the new law.

It was the result of a public outcry by some hillside residents over the trend toward larger houses that in many cases conflicted with the existing neighborhood in height, grading and man-made slopes, landscape and the loss of views and privacy, according to a city document on hillside development standards.

Residents also complained about narrow neighborhood streets being blocked or congested by construction traffic, as well as the noise and debris associated with new construction.

The city should not be trying to give hillside owners the right to build homes of the same size as those in the flatlands, said hillside resident Gil Cutler.

“The hillsides are not the flats,” Cutler said. “The newcomer who wants to show how rich they are (by building large houses), that’s fine, but not at our expense.”

Don Epstein, a resident of Loma Vista Drive, protested the development of what he called “monster mansions” allowed under the previous code, including a nearly 27,000-square-foot home under construction on nearby Mountain Drive.

“It’s truly a distressing situation to those who have had to live through 18 months of construction and expect to have to live through another 18 months,” Epstein said.

Epstein noted that he had raised six children in an 8,000-square-foot home.

Other property owners argued, however, that the new ordinance was far too restrictive and would have a negative effect on the value of the property.

“We would be denied the rights enjoyed by other property owners who have already built their homes,” said Janice Plotkin, who owns property with her husband on Tower Road.

The 4,500-square-foot minimum allowed should be at least 8,000 square feet, she said.

City Planning Director Ruth Nadel however, said property values in Trousdale Estates have continued to rise in spite of strict development standards passed by the council that limited new homes to one story.

“No one thinks this ordinance is perfect,” Councilman Allan Alexander said in voting for the ordinance.

But the hillside is different from the flatlands and “we’ve seen in the hillside how a large house can dominate” an area, Alexander said.