Preservation by Design® Four Points
Global Heritage Fund is distinguished by its approach to saving heritage sites, and that approach, called Preservation By Design®, has four points: Conservation, Planning, Partnerships and Community Development. The latter point is what distinguishes us from traditional preservation advocacy groups, so we will get to that.
In a few weeks, I will be moderating a panel discussion with Global Heritage Fund project leaders at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The panel will focus on these four points so I thought I might preview the discussion here. Continue Reading
Preservation as the road to recovery
One of the gratifying things about being in the historic preservation/heritage conservation field is that it is future-oriented. Usually the position preservationists take – which may seem radical at the time – becomes the mainstream position later. So all those blogs of mine earlier this year about preservation as the road to economic recovery? Here is it from the AIA today:
http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/1218/1218rc_historicpreservation.cfm
“Embracing the Economics of Historic Preservation: Reusing and renovating already-constructed buildings can lead the way out of this
recession”
Thanks to Joan Pomaranc at AIAChicago for forwarding this!
Kelo Redux
The big 2005 Supreme Court case – Kelo v. City of New London – that underscored a city’s right to use eminent domain to take private property and give it to another private owner has reached a perhaps inevitable denouement: the City of New London, CT, took Susette Kelo’s house, and a bunch of others, for a private “urban village” to be built next to a new Pfizer development. Now Pfizer is leaving, and taking 1400 jobs with it. Yowch.
The real lesson here has less to do with eminent domain and more to do with economic development. Conservative justices voted against the city, but in a sense the use of eminent domain for private redevelopment has been with us since Berman v. Parker in 1954, which paved the way for urban renewal and preservation. Memory refresher: urban renewal was a public program, but it basically worked like this: the government declared an area “slum and blighted,” bought up all the land and gave it to another private developer to achieve the renewal. Yes, there were housing projects that were completely public, but the biggest part of urban renewal involved the same sort of eminent domain and transfer of property to another private owner we saw in New London. Continue Reading