Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
Well, as long as they build something much taller and denser, no biggie
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I basically disagree. I really value density. And I think unfettered markets do a pretty good job of deciding how cities should get built out. But I also think that unique, old, irreplaceable building stock has a value to a city that isn't fully priced into its sale price, because that value is distributed in a space outside of the lot boundaries and is difficult to price and difficult to extract. In these cases, the market may not give a property owner a good mechanism to make decisions.
Even if that isn't true, old building stock can't ever be re-built. Once it's gone, it's gone. We might not understand right now what it will be worth in the future, so we should be humble and proceed cautiously when we approve of its destruction. We'll always have the chance to tear it down later, so I think of this as the "measure twice, cut once" approach to historic preservation.