Some people get it – historic designation and affordability
It has been fashionable over the last dozen years to blame historic designation for the rising cost of housing in cities and towns nationwide. If your brain is in a simple, mechanistic mode, it might seem that regulations that encourage the preservation of single-family homes could limit the supply of denser, cheaper alternatives. That has a logical flow to it that can be seductive if you leave your brain in that simple, mechanistic mode. Don’t do that. It’s reptilian.
Some people do get it – my friend and colleague Paul Steinke of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia shared a recent article by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic titled Knocking Down a Fable About City Historic Districts. Inga Saffron wrote there “is no credible evidence showing that historic preservation is the reason Philadelphia has become more expensive.” She sees the culprit as zoning. When I researched the history of zoning for my dissertation, it was clear that its wide adoption in the early 20th century was driven by suburbs that wanted only single-family homes. I get it.
There has been an effort in many places (Minneapolis, Oregon) to get rid of single-family zoning because it inhibits affordability. I summarized this in a blog last year. There a strong YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement with similar goals. Ed Glaeser was a big champion of this theory in his book Triumph of the City, which I reviewed when it came out. I was not terribly concerned about his argument against historic districts because it had problems of scale, causation and even economics.
SCALE
Even the most preservation oriented cities landmark less than 5% of their buildings. That includes New York if you count all the boroughs. Yes, Manhattan might have up to a fifth of its buildings with historic status, but Manhattan is a unicorn in so many ways that unicorns should be called Manhattans instead. So, how could 4% of properties drive the cost of the other 96%?
Chicago has 60 districts and about 350 individual landmarks. The Chicago Historic Resources Survey done in the 1980s and 1990s identified 17,000 buildings that might have historic interest. So that’s a lot, right! I mean, there are about 370,000 buildings in Chicago, so we are talking 4.5%! But most of those “orange-rated” buildings get torn down after a short demolition delay, so our real percentage thirty years later is smaller.
Now, I did live in a suburb – Oak Park, Illinois – that had landmarked what looks like about a third of its footprint, beginning with the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School of Architecture Historic District back in the 1980s. Interestingly, its 1994 Long Range Preservation Plan called for more ADUs (called coach houses or granny flats) – that is to say: more density and a step away from single-family zoning.
As you can see, Oak Park does have a lot of big historic districts, but they do not include the apartments and highrises where a majority of the suburb’s population has lived for the last two generations. The third dimension is missing from the map. Most of the residents do not live in a historic district.
Preservation folks have been encouraging greater density in those districts since 1994. Last week the Village Board took up the issue. 30 years later. (Preservationists are always WAY ahead of the game.)
Similarly, Saffron’s article on Philadelphia noted that the Old City historic district has quadrupled in population since the district was created in 2003. And as my friend Jim Bailey notes, right in the center of the oldest historic district in Texas is a 1920s development with a density of 126 units per acre. It looks like this:
So, scale is an issue and density can work in historic districts. There is also the problem of…..
CAUSATION (ECONOMICS)
Where does real estate value come from? Location, location, location, right? I bought a Frank Lloyd Wright house in 1991 for $1, but it had a negative $40,000 value. Another one of the houses in the row recently sold for $30,000, thirty years later. Real estate is as asset whose value is entirely externalized.
Unlandmarked Bucktown in Chicago tripled in value in 1987 while contiguous Wicker Park lagged in landmark limbo. Saffron’s article points to an NYU study that showed the steepest rent increases happened in the least landmarked parts of Brooklyn. Rapidly increasing real estate values, gentrification and displacement happen in many urban areas. Generally, historic districts preserve and enhance real estate values, because they reduce uncertainty about location, location and location – you know it won’t change much. But designation always arrives AFTER rehabilitation has happened. Residents rehab and then act to preserve their investment. Designation doesn’t happen before values go up.*
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Chair Sara Bronin has a book coming out about zoning (Key To The City)and has been speaking regularly about zoning changes that would support BOTH historic preservation and affordable housing, including provisions that: enable housing conversions, create mixed-use neighborhood centers, eliminate minimum parking requirements, encourage accessory dwelling units, and strengthen transferable development rights. As noted above and before, many of these items have been on our playlist for 30 years.
Here in San Antonio, the Office of Historic Preservation has been promoting preservation as affordable housing for some years, releasing a major study in 2019. As Donovan Rypkema, the guru of preservation economics has said for years: “You can’t build new and rent cheap.” In 2024 a million dollars will build you three and a half residential units if you are lucky. The economic challenge is on the supply side.
You can’t build your way to affordability. Better to fix – and add density – to what you have. Existing housing stock is a nonrenewable resource.
2021 – Government Hill, San Antonio
2023
*My dissertation on historic districts basically found zero examples of districts created without strong community support and without rehabilitation already happening at scale.
Sad SAHA
If it wasn’t enough that the San Antonio Housing Authority voted to demolish the Alazan Courts project (1940) just weeks after it was included on the National Trust’s 11 Most Endangered List (see my blog here), they are also moving to destroy the only piece left from Victoria Courts, an administration building from the same era 80 years ago.
Now, the building was found eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places by the Texas Historical Commission, so if SAHA is using federal funds or permits, then it is an “undertaking” and would have to be reviewed by THC in its role as State Historic Preservation Office. It doesn’t mean you can prevent demolition, but it can slow it down and allow people to reconsider.
When historic housing projects first became eligible for listing back in the mid-1990s, a lot of people and media attacked the notion that these hoity-toity preservationists were interfering with the noble goal of providing decent housing for the working poor. And no one does that better than a local housing authority.
Except that isn’t how it is done. The way housing authorities have worked for the last three decades is that they raze their old projects, partner with a private developer who gets tax credits for providing housing for people at 50 or 80 percent of median area income, while also providing market rate housing, thus eliminating economic ghettos and giving people a leg up.
As you may have guessed, this model is problematic, because by the time you displace a family for demolition and rebuilding, you are likely to never see them again. Moreover, the familiar pattern is like this – you slowly depopulate the project so when it is time to raze and redevelop, you have a far smaller number of people you are obligated to rehouse.
Interestingly, many clever developers have become adept at combining the low-income housing tax credits with the historic preservation tax credits. They even offered to help SAHA with Alazan-Apache, so we wrote SAHA and testified at their hearing.
Crickets. Again, nobody likes the hard work.
New Orleans IV
I’m here at the National Trust Board meetings in New Orleans, which is as potent and colorful a mix of culture as the drinks being swilled from plastic billabongs along Bourbon Street. I always thought Mardi Gras was a day, but here it is a couple of weeks. We have, of course, toured Holy Cross and the Lower Ninth and Lakeview to see the excellent work the Trust and others have been doing restoring houses partially wrecked in the man-made disaster following Katrina, and while many of my colleagues were impressed by the progress after 2 1/2 years, I – not having seen it before – was still amazed by how wrecked some of it looked. In 1874 no one noticed the fire that had burned down Chicago in 1871, but in 2008 the path of aftermath Katrina flooding is quite clear in this landscape. Continue Reading