True historic preservation would respect the homes of poor people, too
A state law aims to prevent historic districts from being perverted into a war on diverse housing.
by Michael Andersen | June 6, 2017
History is awesome, when it’s accurate.
That’s exactly why it’s a problem when “historic districts” start being used not to open a window on a city’s shared history, but as a back-door way to prevent changes to the buildings in desirable neighborhoods.
If the main effect of our historic preservation laws were to preserve the homes of rich people, we’d be unintentionally writing poor people out of Portland’s history — and maybe even its future.
This isn’t a theoretical issue.
Two weeks ago, the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association elected a slate of board members who support a National Register Historic District in that neighborhood (average home price, per Zillow: $779,000).
Last week, the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association followed, electing a board that unanimously backs the National Register Historic District plan described in a 44-page report. The report spent thousands of words describing how the plan would make demolition of the neighborhood’s homes (average price: $774,000) “very difficult and rare” and zero words mounting any argument that Laurelhurst’s current buildings are actually uniquely historic.
There’s currently nothing to stop this from happening again and again, in neighborhood after neighborhood. And if that happened, Portlanders wouldn’t just be writing poor people out of history. By greatly slowing the gradual densification of their city, coalitions of local landowners could lock in ever-rising home costs and accidentally write poor people out of Portland’s future, too — without so much as a city council vote.
Historic districts have started to be used in ways that weren’t intended
What’s going on here? As they freely admit, neighborhood backers of these national districts are not motivated by a sudden interest in local history but by a series of interlocking loopholes that let them use a federal administrative process to trigger local laws that essentially block redevelopment of any building that’s found to “contribute” to the district’s historic nature.
Nowhere in the review process for a new national historic district does anyone have to ask “Would permanently deterring infill housing a few blocks from a light rail station have any environmental costs?” or “Is it a good idea to have an entire neighborhood where the cheapest house costs $440,772?”
Not only are people never prompted to consider those questions during the creation of a new national historic district, Portland historic resources manager Brandon Spencer-Hartle said Tuesday: “They’re not allowed to consider them.”
That’s because the federal historic district process was never designed as a way to evaluate a de facto redevelopment ban. It was designed as a way to qualify for a National Historic Register plaque and various opt-in tax credits.
The deeper problem here is that in 1995, Oregon passed a law that uses the low-oversight national historic register as a shortcut for deciding whether a building counts as sufficiently “historic.” Once the state did that, it left no way for local politicians to create their own rules for controlling demolition in historic districts — the sort of rules that could weigh historic preservation against other issues like affordability or housing diversity.
The perverse result: Under current law, national historic districts can be initiated by landowners and approved without anyone formally considering the negative consequences. Democratically elected officials have no power to intervene.
Once that historic district is in place, any building that has been marked as “contributing” (a standard that describes most houses in any national historic district) can never be redeveloped without a direct vote of the city council.
The point here isn’t that historic districts are always bad.
Some buildings of historic significance ought to be preserved. But for any given house or district, someone needs to weigh the benefits of preservation against the costs — and right now, nobody is.
A proposed state law aims to change the rules
Fixing this problem is one of several ideas in Oregon House Bill 2007, part of the state’s many-pronged attack on high housing prices.
The goal of H.B. 2007 is to make it easier to add homes without sprawl. But it’s currently on a knife’s edge in the state legislature, largely because of its changes to future historic districts.
The bill would prevent Oregon cities from looking the other way while landowner-initiated national historic districts lock down one rich neighborhood after another without democratic oversight.
- The bill would require cities to consider, during their hearings on the demolition of a building in a future National Historic Register neighborhood, “the affordability or the proposed development compared to the existing development.”
- The bill would create new exceptions to the requirement for a public hearing over demolition in future National Historic Register neighborhoods: if the new home is affordable to a middle-class household (up to 120 percent of the local median income); if it increases density; if it includes only exterior aesthetic modifications; or if it demolishes only an accessory structure like a garage.
- The bill would preserve cities’ right to create local historic districts, but they still couldn’t use those to prevent a property owner from redeveloping if they want to.
None of these changes would affect national historic districts that already exist, only new ones.
Leading opposition to this part of the bill is Restore Oregon, a statewide historic preservation nonprofit.
Restore Oregon Executive Director Peggy Moretti said in an interview Friday that her goal is to reduce building demolitions. Under the 1995 state law, the National Historic Register process is currently the only way to block a property owner from demolishing their building if they want to.
As for the risk that landowners in any wealthy neighborhood could block infill by getting their area designated as “historic,” Moretti said she sees no realistic chance of that becoming widespread.
In any case, Moretti said, requiring a city council vote every time a freestanding house in a historic district gets replaced with something else isn’t an excessive burden on neighborhood change.
“That’s far from redlining,” Moretti said.
What might a more inclusive historic preservation policy look like?
Housing affordability advocates and historic preservation advocates agree that the state’s historic preservation process is terrible — the national registry is “just not the right tool,” Restore Oregon staffer Dan Everhart said last year.
Restore Oregon believes current law is better than H.B. 2007 as written. But it’s also possible to imagine a compromise around some new and better tool.
In the comments beneath a Portland Tribune editorial this spring warning about the risk of overusing historic districts, Lents resident Alex Reedin laid out an interesting vision:
I am in favor of some historical preservation… But it has to be about shared, equitable history, not about aesthetics and exclusion. I’d be in favor of, say, a program to preserve say 100 historic buildings around the city including the following attributes:
• Homes and buildings open to the public and student field trips a good number of hours a year.
• More homes of the poor and lower classes than of the wealthy (there were many more poor and lower class people than wealthy). Also a focus on the historic homes and businesses of ethnic minorities.
• A focus on the stories of the people who lived there — told year round with sidewalk-accessible plaques, etc.
• Distributed fairly evenly around the city. There are old farmhouses everywhere in the city.
The wealthy inner parts are not the only areas with history.
That’s just one take. Here’s another, from local architecture writer Randy Gragg last year:
Make historic preservation important again. Sorry, that doesn’t mean stopping demolitions or creating more historic districts (especially the ones, like Irvington’s, that are really about stopping development). … We also need to recognize that “old” does not equal “valuable” — and concentrate our efforts on buildings that truly add texture, beauty, and meaning.
The benefits of a more concentrated, inclusive vision for historic preservation wouldn’t just be academic.
If more Portlanders had firsthand knowledge of how Portland housed its poorest residents during its past booms, today’s housing debate would be smarter.
Garage apartments, internal divisions of big old houses, two-story wood-frame apartment buildings: all cheap, all legal in Portland during World War II.
So was rent control, for that matter. It lasted from 1941 to 1945.
One of Portland’s current historic districts, in Old Town-Chinatown, does indeed preserve some homes of poor people. But if the city’s future historic districts were to gradually become code for “neighborhoods designed for rich people,” we wouldn’t be improving appreciation of Portland’s history. We’d be obscuring it.
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