Neighbors Say Man’s Home Is a Castle : Real estate: Homeowner draws complaints but says he upgraded neighborhood. City considers ordinance to curb ‘mansionization.’

Mehdi Yazdi’s dream home is a Mediterranean-style mansion that could blend easily into the tony neighborhoods of Brentwood or Beverly Hills, with six bedrooms, an entryway nearly 35 feet high and a gold-plated mailbox out front.

But on a hillside cul-de-sac in Burbank, where most homes are much smaller, the mansion stands out like an overdressed guest at a casual party.

“It’s a beautiful home. It’ll overwhelm you,” said Louise Penn, a real estate broker who lives adjacent to the mansion. “As you go around the corner, it’s like, ‘Whew! Where did this come from?’ It’s a tremendously large home on a small lot.”

As Yazdi’s next-door neighbor, Meiko Powers, put it: “These lots were not designed for huge, huge homes. We’d literally be on top of each other.”

Across the Southland in recent years, many municipal governments have grappled with the problem of “mansionization,” or the building of houses so large they are out of character for their neighborhoods. Cities such as Los Angeles, Glendale and Pasadena have written ordinances aimed at controlling it.

The next may be Burbank, where the City Council is considering tightening restrictions on single-family homes.

The central issue is how to balance the rights of property owners with the interests of the community.

Burbank city planners theorize that mansionization stems from homeowners’ desire to expand their existing house rather than buy a new one and real estate investors’ hopes of turning a profit by making additions to smaller houses.

At least one expert outside of Burbank is puzzled by the trend.

“People tend to group themselves by income. They don’t want to be pointed out as the rich people or poor people on the block. They don’t want their neighbors to be so different in lifestyle that they are far better or worse than they are,” said George Lefcoe, a professor of real estate law at USC.

Mansionization, he added, is “very surprising, counter-intuitive thinking.”

For Yazdi, an electronic parts manufacturer, expanding his old 1,700-square-foot house made sense because he could save money by doing most of the work himself.

His single-story, three-bedroom home had been purchased for $285,000 in 1988 and was about half the size of his next-door neighbor’s.

With approval from city officials to do substantial remodeling, Yazdi built a two-story, 5,500-square-foot house that was completed in May--work that typically costs about $1 million, he said.

“I think I upgraded the neighborhood,” the 40-year-old father of two said.

“I thought they were gonna appreciate me. I put something nice in the neighborhood. I was surprised when (neighbors) reacted that way.”

Neighbors complain that the house, considered to be a standard size in some neighborhoods but a mansion in this one, blocks their hilltop views and gives Yazdi’s family an unobstructed peek into their back yards.

If approved, Burbank’s anti-mansionization ordinance would impose height limits of 35 feet on new houses along hillsides in northeast Burbank and 27 feet in the rest of the city, making it impossible for homes taller than Yazdi’s to be built without a conditional-use permit.

The ordinance would also limit the size a new house can be in proportion to its lot. Presently, there is no such restriction and the height limit for all single-family houses is 35 feet.

The City Council will discuss the ordinance again Nov. 8, after the matter was postponed from a Sept. 13 meeting. At that time, Councilman Robert Bowne questioned the need for such a measure in a city with few houses 35 feet high.

“I don’t really believe there’s a big enough case to be made that this is a big enough problem in Burbank,” he said.

City Planner Rick Pruetz acknowledged Bowne’s point: “It certainly isn’t a problem like it’s been in certain communities like Beverly Hills, though we’ve had big houses go up where we’ve received negative comments.”

Efforts to control mansionization have worked well in Pasadena, where city planners say most people are complying with the stricter building requirements.

But in Los Angeles, which has tried to control mansionization since June, it’s too early to tell, said Planning Associate Steve Ciccarelli.

“Who knows what the socio-economical reasons are for going to larger homes?” he said. “But for years, people didn’t maximize the potential development of their property.”

USC’s Lefcoe says he can’t understand why people are doing so now.

Current housing prices, he said, make it far cheaper to purchase a new house rather than adding on to an existing one. And it will be difficult for the owner of an oversize house to sell it unless he or she can find someone willing to stand out in a neighborhood, he added.