Historic Preservation Is Great, Except When It Isn’t

[M II A II R II K]

Historic Preservation Is Great, Except When It Isn’t


September 28, 2020

By Scott Beyer

Read More: https://www.governing.com/community/...n-It-Isnt.html

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I understand why cities would want to maintain their distinctive architectural characters. Doing so enhances a city's identity, think Brooklyn's brownstones or Boston's three-deckers and in smaller towns and cities it can be the main economic driver. Had Savannah, Ga., not preserved its historic core, for example, it likely would be just another stagnant Southern city. Across rural America, towns are often made or broken on their ability to re-adapt their old main street buildings. But historic preservation, if mandated to excess, can hinder good urbanism.

- One of the problems with historic preservation stems, ironically, from one of its benefits: It improves the quality of a neighborhood by increasing its home values. A Realtor.com study of 2,885 historic homes found that they were 5.6 percent more expensive than similar-sized homes in the same ZIP code. And even if homes aren't historic, they enjoy a 1.4 percent faster increase in property values just from being inside a historic district. But in escalating home prices, preservation works against the more important goal of housing affordability. This may not be a huge problem in smaller cities like Savannah, but it is in bigger cities that have diverse economic functions. — Take Manhattan, for example. According to 2014 data from New York University's Furman Center, it has placed 27 percent of its land plots inside historic districts (compared to under 1 percent in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island). It's more difficult to make repairs to buildings when they're in these districts, much less demolish them for new structures. That caused these districts to produce far less housing through the 1980s and '90s than non-historic ones did.

- Historic preservation also holds back economic development. While a tasteful, well-preserved neighborhood increases home values for individual owners, it may suppress land values by limiting parcels from their optimum use. That reduces a city's potential tax base and stifles creative new projects that might've gone where an out-of-date building now sits. Manhattan's beautiful First Church of Christ Scientist, for example, has been empty since 2004 because the Landmarks Preservation Commission would not allow its conversion. This forced the church to sell the building, and the purchaser lobbied for 16 years to make it a children's museum. Although the LPC finally approved those plans in June, the prolonged underuse has caused the church to fall into disrepair. Were it active this whole time for a commercial, residential or civic use, it would almost certainly have been better maintained. — But perhaps the main argument against historic districts is aesthetic. Rather than letting neighborhoods develop a nice blend of old and new buildings, it keeps them stuck in time. This may be desirable to those who view cities as museums, but it amounts to a lame bit of romanticism for those who think cities should be dynamic, evolving places.

- A rule of thumb for preservation policy: Apply it to specific buildings, not whole districts. There are policies that let cities do this in market-driven ways, incentivizing rather than mandating developers to preserve buildings. Cities, for instance, can grant property tax relief to owners who restore historic properties, as California municipalities do under the state's Mills Act. Cities can authorize transfers of development rights, as Seattle does, allowing owners to build elsewhere (or sell the rights to build elsewhere to developers) in exchange for maintaining their historic properties. And federal and state historic-tax-credit programs help developers fund repairs and conversions. Cities should make liberal use of these policies, especially if they have an interesting architectural history and lots of developers who specialize in preservation work. — The flipside, though, is to let buildings that surround these historic ones, and that aren't distinctive, be redeveloped for modern uses. That not only advances the goals of housing affordability, economic development and aesthetic diversity but also helps the historic properties themselves by increasing commercial foot traffic.

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Rendering of the First Church of Christ Scientist in Manhattan as a children's museum, a project that has taken 16 years to complete because of historic preservation restrictions. (Photo courtesy of FXCollaborative)







Atlanta is one city that did this well: It used the Krog Street Market and the Ponce City Market, two old brick warehouses that were converted into mixed-use shopping centers, to anchor new surrounding mid-rise development. This, along with the city's popular 22-mile BeltLine rail-trail, has helped foster a contiguous urban area along the city's eastside.

[eschaton]

It would be complicated to figure out, but I wish historic preservation took into account "higher and better use"

For example, here in Pittsburgh, there was a plan to demolish this historic church for a one-story drive-thru Starbucks. A strange choice, considering, there is a Starbucks in a hotel lobby literally a block away. Public outcry resulted in the church getting historic designation, protecting it from demolition. Now it's a vacant eyesore.

I absolutely think it was the wrong choice to knock down a historic structure for such a low-quality use. But now in the future if they say want to take out the Wendy's and Levin Mattress around the back, and use them along with the church parcel for a several-hundred unit apartment building...well, they can't. And this isn't even that theoretical, considering several large new-construction apartment buildings have gone in that corridor over the last decade.

Basically, don't knock down historic buildings to make way for a lower use (parking, strip malls) or an equal use (replacing a single-family home with a single-family home). But if there's a plan for a significant project, weigh the pros and cons. Consider if the developer has iron-clad financing or if it could go poof post-demolition. Look at how many jobs and housing units will be involved. How unique really is the historic structure?

But more broadly, in general I think we focus so much on historic buildings because everyone understands the "we don't build em like we used to" thing. If modern neotraditional styles were popular and affordable to build, and codes and zoning allowed for the same sort of finely-grained development, there would be nothing big about losing historic buildings - because we would be constantly building new buildings just as interesting.

[Ifactwo]

I hope that all natural and majestic infrastructions across the world will be preserved.

[drummer]

I would agree that use has to come into play. To consider the significant of the historical site or building, etc., is difficult because of so much subjectivity. Some people will cling to something others would see completely useless or void of historical impact, for instance. Some people are just plain nostalgic while others are wholly opposed to growth and use historical designation as a way to fight it. We see it in the Austin area and I know other cities have the same issue, if not more.