By Lisa Gray from the Houston Chronicle

How big is too big? When it comes to houses, the city of Houston almost always leaves that question to the property owner — never mind what the rest of the neighborhood thinks of the McMansion rising in its midst.

But increasingly, Houston is alone. Fast-growing cities everywhere from Austin to Atlanta have put measures in place to limit the size of new houses. Last month, even Los Angeles, a city not known for restraint, took a step in that direction: The L.A. city council voted unanimously to limit living large.

The "mansionization ordinance," as everyone calls L.A.'s new rule, restricts the size of new construction in most of the city's single-family neighborhoods to roughly half of a lot's square footage. For instance, on a typical 5,000-square-foot lot, you could build a 2,500-square-foot house. If the second story is smaller than the first, so that the house looks less bulky, the house can be a little bigger — in this case, up to 3,000 square feet.

The L.A. ordinance allows neighborhoods to choose different maximum sizes than the default, and a few will likely invite the enormous three-story stucco boxes so reviled in most of the city. But even more neighborhoods are expected to choose tighter size controls, such as limiting construction to one story.

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