Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s plan to address large-scale houses — as well as two alternate proposals — will be aired by the full Honolulu City Council for the first time at its meeting Wednesday.

The Council asked the administration to come up with an overarching policy to address large-scale houses amid growing concern that an increasing number of “monster houses” have invaded communities.

The critics pointed out that the outsize houses are often used illegally as vacation rentals, dormitories or other unapproved businesses that strain street parking and other infrastructure, are unsightly and are out of character with the older neighborhoods — such as Kaimuki, Manoa and Kalihi — where they’ve been showing up.

The key component of the city Department of Planning and Permitting proposal, Bill 80, is that it limits the size of houses proportional to their lots. It requires that, generally, houses on properties zoned for residential use have a floor area ratio, or FAR, no larger than 0.7.

FAR is computed as the ratio of the floor area of house to its lot size. A 5,000-square-foot lot would allow a house no larger than 3,500 square feet, and a 10,000-square-foot lot would limit a house to up to 7,000 square feet.

Under current law the size limit of a home is not determined by its FAR. Instead, houses are restricted by how much of the lot of is covered by the house, or its footprint. Currently, the footprint of a house can be up to 50 percent of the lot in a residential zone.

The City Council’s Planning Commission, however, voted at its Oct. 17 meeting to recommend a stricter 0.6 FAR limit. Under the commission’s proposal, a 5,000-square-foot lot would be limited to a house no more than 3,000 square feet, and a 10,000-square-foot lot a house would be limited to 6,000 square feet. The commission’s proposal is not in a bill, but is instead part of a memo that accompanied Bill 80.

While the DPP draft has a more lenient 0.7 FAR ceiling, it would impose stricter conditions on those who build between 0.6 and 0.7 FAR. They would need to have more parking stalls, greater side and backyard setbacks and other restrictions.

How those stricter provisions would be incorporated if the Council chooses to go with a 0.6 FAR is unclear because there’s no direction from the commission on those points.

Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, a member of the community group HI Good Neighbor, which is opposed to monster houses, said the organization has been calling for a FAR cap in residential zones. The group prefers the lower 0.6 FAR in the Planning Commission’s draft, he said, noting that apartment zones allow density to be capped at between 0.53 and 0.6.

Dos Santos-Tam said his group also wants the Council to consider limiting the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and laundry rooms allowed, among other things, “to stop these homes from acting like full-on apartments in our single-family neighborhoods.”

Also up for consideration Wednesday will be Bill 79, a draft initially proposed by Councilman Trevor Ozawa, who’s been at the forefront of the discussion on large-scale houses. It calls for additional restrictions such as a limit on wet bars and requiring more parking, while allowing a homeowner to petition for a permit to go larger.

A temporary moratorium that prohibits new building permits for single-family homes over 0.7 FAR has been in place since March. DPP officials said this drastically reduced the number of permits for homes with more than eight bedrooms and seemed like a reasonable new standard.