Home wreckers: before putting up a multimillion-dollar monster manse at the right address, builders often tear something down.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: BUILDING NORTH CAROLINA

David Smoots steers a white Chevy Suburban along the tree-lined streets of his neighborhood on Charlotte's south side. Many houses in Myers Park went up well over half a century ago, but a lot are vanishing, pushed down by bulldozers and replaced by giant homes that sprawl and tower. Even old brick houses that look stately and sturdy are on shaky ground in a market that values where they stand more than the traditions they stand for. In parts of Myers Park--two to three miles from the tall bank headquarters downtown--new homes outnumber originals.

It's happening across North Carolina and the nation. From the beaches to the mountains, some of the state's older neighborhoods convulse daily as construction workers tend the birth of behemoths sired by a strong economy and changing lifestyles. Neighbors watch warily as one lot after another is cleared and rebuilt. Tyvek is everywhere. Consumers who want higher ceilings, more-spacious kitchens and other amenities are driving the demand for bigger houses. But in many cases, the catalysts are builders who buy property, tear down what's there and put up new houses on speculation that a buyer will emerge.

Smoots has nudged the trend along as a home buyer--his 7,000-square-foot house replaced a 1,600-square-foot one--and as director of sales for Charlotte-based Simonini Builders Inc. With 109 employees and more than $100 million annual revenue, Simonini is among the largest builders in Charlotte tearing down houses and replacing them. But it has plenty of competitors, bigger and smaller. A block in Myers Park might have the signs of three or four builders in its front yards. Simonini started in 1973 as a builder of customized homes, but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that it more than occasionally did teardowns. Smoots is its point man for them.

Putting up houses in older neighborhoods is trickier and often costlier than building on virgin land in the suburbs. The lots are frequently more expensive. The equation also is more likely to include time spent working around trees, calming fears of nearby residents, driving equipment in and out with minimal damage to landscaping and neighborhood harmony and solving problems caused by each lot's peculiarities. "It pushes the cost up because your productivity goes down," says David Batie, associate professor of construction management at East Carolina University.

When you're done, there's a good chance someone isn't going to like what you did. Smoots stops his Suburban at a home developed by another builder--a two-story, brick-and-stone, 5,600-square-foot house with a tall, steep roof, bordered on three sides by low-slung red-brick ranch houses. "Quite frankly, I don't think it's in keeping at all with the neighborhood. I don't think that will age well. I am ticked off about stuff like that. I don't appreciate that. That's an opportunist right there."

Builders might disagree on what's appropriate, but as long as people are buying new houses in old neighborhoods, they will try to satisfy the demand. For the deals to work...