Blaming the building revisited: Takoma DC edition

Originally uploaded by Matt**

(Flickr photo of the Takoma Theatre by Matt**)

I went for the first time to an ANC 4B meeting last night. I have to say that while I wasn't always impressed with the level of deliberativeness, the discussion was civil, the majority informed, the ANC Chair was a pretty good manager, keeping things moving, and there were a decent number of people present.

I went because of the Takoma Theatre issue. The building is located in the Takoma Historic District and therefore is protected by DC historic preservation regulations. The owner would like to tear the building down and replace it with a different, allegedly more profitable building. The historic preservation regulations make this very very difficult, but not impossible.

There is a hearing on the matter scheduled for October 22nd, and the ANC was considering the matter, in view of their consultative role on matters before DC government agencies and commissions. (After lengthy discussion, in order to be able to consider the issue more fully, ANC4B set up a special meeting, for Thursday October 15th.)

In some of the back and forth discussion, some of the people favored the proposal, not because they thought that a theater was not a good use, but because for all intents and purposes the owner has abandoned the building, and it sits there, somewhat decrepit and mostly unused--and the building scares them, hulking over the street, making what could be a lively intersection, 4th and Butternut Streets, empty and foreboding.

(Separately, there is the Takoma Theatre Conservancy effort which is working up a plan to buy and rehabilitate the building and get it to become an active community and city arts and cultural asset. The Conservancy has conducted a feasibility study and are now conducting a rehabilitation study, in preparation for a better future for the building.)

What these people were doing is what I call "blaming the building." In what I call the "language of revitalization," "blight" is really about "disinvestment". Too often the word is used to justify demolition when really the issue is one of investment, maintenance, and opportunity.

The answer/solution to nuisance properties/disinvestment is investment, not demolition.

Too often people are lulled into believing that demolition, especially of historic buildings, is a solution to "blight" when merely it creates a different form of blight, one that is harder and more expensive to correct (building a new building).

Besides the fact that a property owner letting a building fall into disuse shouldn't be rewarded for creating a nuisance property, the owner's belief that he can build any time soon a 45 unit apartment building in place of the theater building in this market is not credible.

Nuisance properties can be opportunities. See the past entry, "Bringing buildings back is really about bringing urban neighborhoods back."

An Upper West Side advertisement by a New York real estate firm borrows from the aesthetic popularized by Barbara Kruger's art, below, in the 1980s. "My work was always about questioning the power, the ownership of images," the artist says. (Photo by Lucy Hogg)

But not when the owner is recalcitrant.