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s A -r 1.0 INTRODUCTION Newton is a community of approximately 83,000 people on eighteen square miles of land immediately west of Boston. It was settled in 1630,but.a significant part of the city's development took place in the,late 1800's as a result of the introduction of a rail line from Boston to the west. There was another burst of development after World War II, ' particularly in the southern part of the city. Newton is a.very attractive community today because of its well.maintained residential neighborhoods, its good schools,;its proximity to downtown Boston (eight miles) and its location at the intersection of two major regional roads - I-90 (Massachusetts Turnpike) and I-95, a circumferential highway around the city. Socio-economically, although there are areas of low and moderate income.households, Newton is considered an affluent community where the average single family homes sales are above $425,000. Seventy-three percent of the homes are single family. 2.0 CONTEXT FOR CHANGE The predominant feature of the community is the fact.that there is.no one center, but thirteen villages, each with its own character. People tend to relate more to their villages. with tree-lined residential neighborhoods, rather than the city as a whole. Thus, when the housing market heated up several years ago, and developers started to take advantage of Newton's real estate market by tearing down smaller.homes to build larger ones, citizens reacted strongly to their changing neighborhoods. Residents besieged their aldermen. . (there are twenty-four of them, three from each of eight wards) and the Planning Department with pleas for how to stop the "monster homes". 3.0=PLANNING DEPARTMENT EFFORTS First the Planning Department had to define the issue. What were residents reacting to and what did they want? In addition to the market pressures to build in Newton, developers were building very large structures out of scale with the neighborhoods in which they were located. For example; 21 Puddingstone Road has a 6,600 sf. house on a 27,000 sf: lot. In other neighborhoods, developers were tearing down single-family homes and, where allowed,building by right two-family homes. For example, 16-18.. Tanglewood Road has a 5,136 sf. two-family house on a 11,500 sf. lot. In this case, a 1.