On Tuesday night, the City Council unanimously voted to make it harder to build giant homes on small lots.

To approve the new rules, council members made compromises and passed an ordinance they conceded would please few.

Residents in most neighborhoods will have the automatic right to build up to two stories. That is shorter than the previous standard, which allowed around three stories, but taller than the one story urged by city planners and fought by real estate firms and developers.

"Everyone will be able to build, expand and renovate," said Councilwoman Jill Remington Love, responding to complaints that the regulations would curtail construction, scare away large families or restrict property rights. "For some who want to go beyond the reasonable standards we set tonight, you'll have to go through a process."

Three-story homes and more may still be built if surrounding homes are that tall. If not, homeowners will have to work through the city bureaucracy with more input from neighbors.

There were other changes, from limiting the size of garages, to reducing the percentage of land on which structures can be built.

The goal of council members was to tame so-called monster homes, where smaller homes in established neighborhoods have been torn down or remodeled and replaced with a much larger structure that doesn't fit in.

Bryan Kohler, CEO of the Salt Lake Board of Realtors, agreed the garage-mahals must go. But he said some of the city's new rules are too restrictive. He took issue with limiting buildings to 40 percent of the lot, down from 55 percent. (On a 5,000-square-foot lot, a one-story home would be 2,000 square feet instead of 2,750.)

Kohler said buildings should be able to take up more space, around 60 percent of the lot, because homeowners would rather have smaller backyards in exchange for more bedrooms.

"You're ensuring certain demographics can't ever move to Salt Lake. Their families are too big," he said before the meeting. "We have less than 10 examples of monster homes. We have 80,000 total homes in Salt Lake City. We now may be creating a solution that is worse than the original problem."

Mayor Rocky Anderson also believes the 40 percent limit is problematic. "Why impose a large backyard on somebody and prohibit bringing more people into our neighborhoods?"

However, Anderson said he didn't expect to veto the ordinance.

The council was challenged in making the rules apply citywide. And so there are exceptions.

Homes in some areas in the Avenues and all of the Wasatch Hollow neighborhood - from 1900 East to 1300 East and 1300 South to 1700 South - will be limited to one floor or the average of other other surrounding homes for six months. The shorter height is temporary to allow neighbors to propose permanent neighborhood-specific regulations.

hmay@sltrib.com