Historic preservation continued

In response to Cavan's points in yesterday's entry on preservation:

You have to remember that historic preservation was central to retaining people with choice in the many decades when trends did not favor urban living.

So while I don't know MoCo well enough to figure out why places like Chevy Chase remained relatively untouched in MoCo w/o historic preservation guidelines I would aver this has to do with the fact that the neighborhoods are comparatively wealthy with quality housing stock and other desirable qualities and that maintenance of these qualities is a priority whether or not there are preservation guidelines...

--------
Addition: Partly this has to do with the difference in perception of the value of the respective places at the time.

For example, places like Chevy Chase, Maryland, not in the city, were valued both for its location and for the qualities of place. For the most part in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s especially, DC neighborhoods, even close-in neighborhoods, were not valued for the quality of place, but only for their location. This became particularly pronounced after the 1968 riots.

"Urban pioneers," be they gay ( see A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture by Will Fellows) or straight (see Living City by Gratz or Changing Places by Willkie and Moe), but committed to beauty and quality, were the exception.

The demolition of this building by the Capitol Hill Baptist Church touched off the campaign to create a local historic preservation law, to provide protections against "local undertakings." At the time, the federally designated historic districts only provided protection against projects funded by the federal government.
---------

I do know that most preservationists in Washington, those dating from the 1960s and 1970s in particular, took up preservation at a time when stabilization of the city and its neighborhoods was the utmost priority.

What to do in the face of a shrinking population "scarred people" at least in my opinion, and it shapes how they look at the world today.

And yes, as anon (and w in other entries points out), groups like the Capitol Hill Restoration Society appear to be overly focused on parking and such, rather than placemaking and livability and promoting transit.

One of the problems with advocacy for placemaking is there is no real organization that does it nationally. (In reality, Project for Public Spaces functions more like a consulting firm, as conducting planning projects around the country provides the bulk of its income).

I argue that next generation historic preservation needs to incorporate placemaking and livability issues more firmly and directly into the agenda. And I would argue that the National Trust for Historic Preservation isn't grappling with these issues the way that I think they ought to be.

Frankly, it is the urban design aspects of historic neighborhoods that make historic neighborhoods potentially such livable places and efficient loci for transit. It's not the historic architecture necessarily that contributes these qualities, although it is nice to look at.

(For a variety of aesthetic reasons, I prefer this kind of architecture, and I would argue that it isn't strictly a matter of "opinion" or aesthetics, but the result of a particular way of building and designing, based on materials and technologies and expectations about living that result in housing with externally-supporting qualities at the same time maximizing internal, or household, supporting qualities as well. Production home building techniques and home building for the suburban setting has tended to focus home building around automobility and internal-supporting qualities at the expense of supporting external, connecting to the world outside of the envelope of the house's four walls qualities.)

Preservationists need to figure out how to be concerned about the future and in a setting of potential residential housing and population growth, rather than a setting where the city shrinks. (Note that preservation issues in weak real estate markets are fundamentally different. There it is a matter of maximizing the qualities of place to maintain a neighborhood's relevance, attractiveness, and marketability in the regional residential housing landscape. Altternatively, I get tired of going to National Trust conferences in regions with weak real estate markets and have them brag about being able to do preservation without displacement because it's easy to do that in areas with limited housing demand.)

I argue that preservation (or baring that, design guidelines for the entire city) is still important and relevant in a growing city. The teardowns and popups we are experiencing in most of the well-placed undesignated neighborhoods, otherwise marked by attractive and quality housing stock dating from the 1880s to the 1930s, not having to meet any design requirements, are for the most part incompatible, from a design and quality standpoint, and these new buildings or popups or massive additions significantly alter neighborhoods in ways that diminish overall architectural coherence and attractiveness of these neighborhoods.

In terms of the point about balancing concerns for the external (or neighborhood) with the internal (requirements and desires of the household), most teardowns, popups, and massive additions are done by people who want to maximize and extract the value of the location, without necessarily contributing to either the use or exchange value of the location.

Types of Use Values*

Daily Round: The place of residence is a focal point for the wider routine in which one's concrete daily needs are satisfied.

Informal Support Networks: Place of residence is the potential support of an information network of people who provide life-sustaining products and services.

Security and Trust: A neighborhood also provides a sense of physical and psychic security that comes with a familiar and dependable environment.

Identity: A neighborhood provides its residents with an important source of identity, both for themselves and for others. Neighborhoods offer a resident not only spatial demarcations but social demarcations as well.

Agglomeration Benefits: A shared interest in overlapping use values (identity, security, and so on) in a single area is a useful way to define neighborhood.

Ethnicity: Not infrequently, these benefits are encapsulated in a shared ethnicity... When this occurs, ethnicity serves as a summary characterization of all the overlapping benefits of neighborhood life.

(* From chapter four of Urban Fortunes: A Political Economy of Place by Logan and Molotch.)