Growing pains — Salt Lakers rushing to remodel while they can

As Salt Lake City leaders languish though what some have estimated will be a six-month process to curb monster-home building, anxious remodelers are clamoring to push their projects through before the new regulations set in.

City building license director Orion Goff says his office is being overwhelmed by requests from people throughout the city, including Sugar House, who are looking to expand, remodel or rebuild their homes before it's too late to build big.

"They're trying to hurry and take advantage of the current ordinance and get their project through here," Goff said. "People are just saying that 'I better hurry and get my project started' so they can build as high as they want."

The rush is overwhelming Goff's inspection office, which was already understaffed.

"It's created a tough situation down here, but we'll work through it," Goff said.

A group of Avenues residents and city planners is looking to create some restrictions on building homes that are out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood. Michel Call's 6,000 square foot "monster home" at 675 8th Ave., which replaced the former 1,200-foot home that used to be there, has brought the issue to a head.

The City Council voted to put a moratorium on tearing down old homes and replacing them with giant new ones earlier this year but that moratorium was later rescinded.

Instead, the committee is now looking at putting restrictions on new-home building in the Avenues. The restrictions would probably look much like those recently implemented in the Yalecrest area. There the maximum height of homes was lowered from 30 feet to 27.5 feet, and the outside wall heights were reduced to a maximum of 17 feet.

With pending restriction coming, and the fact that bigger homes will make a person's property investment greater, people are lining up to start projects before the new restrictions come.

"This issue has upped the ante as far as people wanting to get it done now before the council makes any move to change it," Goff said. "People are wanting to maximize their investments, so they're probably wanting to make it as big as they possibly can."

And as the building inspection department is overwhelmed, at least one "monster garage" project slipped through the cracks.