The Battle of the Big Houses is coming to Lawrence City Hall.

City commissioners at their meeting on Tuesday will consider new regulations that could make it easier to convert large, old homes into boarding houses that could be rented out to five or more people.

The proposed regulations are creating disagreements among members of Oread neighborhood, landlords and planners.

“If it continues along this path, I’m afraid Oread mainly will be a neighborhood of party houses, and owner-occupied homes largely will disappear,” said Carol von Tersch, an Oread resident who is opposing the new rules.

But city planners and several boarding house investors said the new regulations will help save old homes from demolition.

“There was a lot of discussion that the economics do not support remodeling or renovating many of these large structures as traditional homes,” said Scott McCullough. “It just doesn’t work from a financial standpoint.”

By allowing a home to be classified as a boarding house — technically the new ordinance calls them congregate living facilities — the houses are exempt from the requirement that no more than four unrelated people can live in an Oread home. Boarding houses can only be located in areas zoned for multi-family uses, not single-family neighborhoods.

The biggest changes in the regulations are in the parking standards. The proposed regulations would lessen the amount of off-street parking spaces required to convert an existing home into a boarding house. For example, a 12-bedroom boarding house currently must provide nine off-street parking spaces. Under the new regulations, seven off-street spaces would be required.

But the regulations would increase the amount of parking required if a boarding house were built on a vacant lot or on the site of a demolished home. In those cases, new boarding houses would be required to provide one parking space per bedroom.

Several Oread residents want that parking standard also to be used for converting existing homes into boarding houses. But investors said the small lot sizes in Oread would make that standard infeasible, and would again make it more likely that large, old homes would continue to deteriorate or be demolished.

Commissioners meet at 6:35 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.