After a year of informal discussion, meetings got under way April 1 between owner-trustee Terry Healy and residents of the Rolling Farm neighborhood to determine the exact number of houses.

Also at issue are lot configurations and "the entire aesthetics," said Jim DeBoy, president of the Rolling Farm Homeowners Association, whose neighborhood borders the development site at South Rolling and Wilkens Avenue.

"The issues will be resolved, I'm sure," he said. "We are not opposed to development, not at all. We are only concerned as a homeowners association about our long-term property values."

Healy and DeBoy both declined to reveal specifics of the proposed development, as plans have not yet been filed with Baltimore County.

"I do not want to put that out on the table right now because everything is very preliminary at this point," Healy said on April 3.

Residential zoning for the site varies, allowing two houses per acre for most of the area and as many as 3.5 houses per acre for a smaller portion.

Depending on the size and arrangement of lots, a minimum of 14 houses might be built on the site. The Healy house will remain.

As trustee for the family trust that owns the site, Healy said he must "try to get as much as we can out of the property,"

But the family also wants to cooperate with neighbors, he said.

"We started discussions probably a year ago," said Healy, 49, who represents himself and nine other Healy family members who share ownership of the property his parents, Dorothy and Dr. John Healy, acquired in 1954.

Until the mid-1970s, the family housed race and show horses at the farm.

Maryland tax records for 1011 South Rolling Road show a 2008 assessed value of $639,426.

The site currently includes a three-story, 7,712-square foot, frame house that dates to the early 1900s, a barn and a swimming pool and pool house.

"A subdivision is something that has been talked about among the family for years preceding my parents' deaths," Terry Healy said.

His mother died about 15 years ago and his father, a well-known Arbutus physician for whom the football field at Cardinal Gibbons School is named, died in 2005.

Ten of their 10 children grew up at the farm and several still live at the house.

A Foxhall Farm resident, he said his other siblings live in Catonsville, Ellicott City and northern Virginia.

Healy declined to estimate when the development plan might go public, saying he wants to continue working with Rolling Farm residents before submitting a plan to the county.

Their cooperation is crucial, as any plan likely will require an entrance crossing property owned by an individual Rolling Farm resident or by the homeowners association, DeBoy said.

Healy said he would prefer not to place an entrance directly at South Rolling Road and would choose one of two alternate routes that would require community cooperation.

A sediment pond at the site prevents access by way of Wilkens Avenue, he said.

Although he had no specific design for the proposed houses, Healy estimated they would be "high end" in price and similar in design to the single-family, freestanding colonials at Rolling Farm.

Developed in the late 1980s, the nine lots on Rolling Farm Court range in size from about 0.6 acres to almost two acres each.

"We are all over a half-acre and a couple of our lots are up to the 2-acre mark," said DeBoy, who bought his 2,364- square-foot house on 0.8 acres in 1989.

DeBoy emphasized that he and his neighbors have no intention of preventing development at the Healy farm.

"We are not here to stop it," he said. "We want to control it a little bit."