The Wrong Way to Make History

Forced Preservation Perpetuates the Unjust Practices of the Past

I love old buildings: the patina of time-worn timber and bronze; the intricacy of handwrought details; the texture of sensuous stone and sinuous glass; the aroma of a place saturated with history—I love it all. In my prior professional life, I was involved in the restorations of two historic buildings, each a rare survivor of a bygone style—out of fashion, but ever charming. It was a joy to be part of breathing life back into these decrepit places, and, in turn, their neighborhoods.

So let me tell you why I’ve opposed two recent historic zonings of properties in Austin.

First, let’s detour to Brooklyn, circa spring 2014.

Back then, I’d left Wall Street to join a California-based Montessori school operator expanding nationwide. When I joined, the principals had been in active lease negotiations for a long-vacant, run-down property in Brooklyn. Built in 1924 as a single-screen movie theater, the building had been converted into a daycare and community center in the 1970s. It was later designated as an individual historic landmark. The conversion in the ‘70s gutted most of its original interior details, with a few plaster ornamental remnants hidden tantalizingly above the dropped acoustic-tile ceiling. The facade was marred by an ugly metal screen that masked the scars left by the removed theater marquee, but it retained its original terracotta castings: molded festoons, friezes featuring lutes, harps, and violins, a dentilled cornice, and a couple urns, all overlooked by a smiling, dead-eyed mask representing Comedy.

The amount of work required to fix up the place was no joke. So what was the appeal?

The primary benefit was that it was already zoned for childcare. Importantly, this meant we could avoid New York’s onerous Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP—the sound your soul makes as it is sucked out of you by a process in which the public, various unelected bodies, City Council, and ultimately the mayor have the power to veto your project at any point along the way.

We signed the lease. Then the real drama began.

While we eluded ULURP, our renovation involved some changes to the exterior of the building that would need to be reviewed by the Land Use Committee of Brooklyn’s Community Board 6 (CB6) and then approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). This did not strike us as such a hurdle, since the plan was to largely keep the facade intact except for the addition of an accessibility ramp, which we were required to install under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So we readied ourselves for a public hearing at CB6. Our project architect prepared several renderings showing the required ADA ramp, a bronze railing and door hardware evoking the building’s original stylings, and a nearly invisible glass canopy to cover the entrance, which subtly referenced the theater marquee.

The members of CB6 were not impressed.

“I don’t like the ramp,” said one. “Can you make the railing black?” asked another. We reminded them that ADA compliance was mandatory and that bronze was historically appropriate. After a half-hour of internal debate and clarifying, again, which building in which neighborhood they were debating, they voted to recommend the project—with a black or brown railing.

In the end, the community board’s recommendations didn’t matter.

When we got to the main arena, Landmarks dismissed them out of hand, spent ten minutes discussing our plans, and told us to go back to the literal drawing board. They wanted us to return the building to something of its former glory, a potentially huge expense that was not in our budget nor accounted for in our project timeline. They liked our glass canopy idea, at least. So, we hired a historic preservation consultant—also not in the budget—who told us exactly what we would need to do to win the LPC’s approval: basically, a complete facade restoration, which required removing the metal grate and repairing the damage caused by the removal of the marquee. We engaged an architectural terracotta contractor to cast custom tiles to replace broken ones, as well as a metalworker to fashion ornamental screens to cover unsightly louvers revealed by the screen’s removal. Everything would have to be painted to match.

This historic building had a century of problems.

It turned out that without altering the placement of the doors on that historic facade—which Landmarks would not allow—we couldn’t actually build the ADA-required ramp. We had to lower the floor of the lobby to ground level instead—and you can bet that wasn’t in the budget or timeline either. Further along, we discovered that a 100’-long brick parapet was structurally unsound, requiring reconstruction—including of the obsolete chimney that was no longer connected to the under-sidewalk vault of the former furnace room, where coal was shoveled in from the street a century prior. The restoration, both historic and structural, added millions to the project budget and caused significant delays in our opening schedule. All the while, the terracotta Comedy mask smirked as the expenses piled up and frowning parents with waitlisted kids piled on.

We eventually got the school open in October 2016 after a grueling process that caused a lot of staff burnout, significant customer churn, and major financing challenges—a pyrrhic victory, at best. The process was so taxing that I abandoned New York for San Francisco, only to find myself working on another school project in yet another historic building.

Oy vey!

I share this tragicomic episode not merely to relive the trauma that still haunts my waking dreams, but to illuminate that historic preservation requires real tradeoffs and significant expenses—as well as a lot of arbitrary proceduralism. Unless you’ve got deep pockets and a strong stomach, rehabilitating historic buildings is generally a bad idea for the average tenant simply looking to open a retail business. Even old buildings that are not designated landmarks will usually have budget-busting landmines hidden behind every undemolished wall. As an organization whose construction experience was limited to white-box strip malls in Southern California, we were definitely overly optimistic (i.e., stupid) about our capabilities in undertaking such a project—but we weren’t ignorant. And that’s the key issue here: when we signed the lease, we already knew that the building was a designated historic landmark.

Not so in Austin, where the Historic Landmark Commission (HLC) has begun slapping historic zonings onto properties—right as the owners apply for demolition permits.

Recently, I got involved with one of these cases regarding a long-vacant, dilapidated building in my East Austin neighborhood that the owner wanted to demolish. The 115-year-old wood-frame building has had many lives over the decades—grocery store, saloon, music venue, addiction rehabilitation center—and it's one of a few buildings that predates the area’s transformation into a segregated “Negro District” after 1928. But while the building has witnessed much history, the building itself hasn’t been legally occupied in years, it lacks significant architectural details, presents challenges with the modern street and sidewalk alignment, and—most importantly—was found to be structurally unsound by two engineers. A majority of polled residents in my neighborhood supported the owner’s desire to demolish the building.

None of that mattered.

As the case worked its way through Austin’s process (which sadly does not have a soul-sucking acronym), it became clear that the building had more symbolic value than historical value. Proponents of historic zoning didn’t like the owner and wanted to not only “teach them a lesson,” but to set a precedent to prevent the demolition of other old (privately owned) buildings in the area. Preservation groups and anti-gentrification activists—many of the same people who have opposed Austin’s recent land use reforms—turned out in droves to condemn, in the words of one activist, “predatory land speculation intent on taking advantage of your vulnerable black and brown residents, who are fighting not to be erased from the city’s history.”

Where were the preservationists in 2015, when the building was on the market and could have been purchased for a fraction of the cost? Where were the concerned citizens of West Austin in the decades prior, when this neighborhood was beset with crime and decay? As Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison, who represents the area and opposed the forced rezoning, drily put it:

I appreciate folks showing up with care and concern over East Austin, but I sure wish it had happened sooner. It certainly wasn’t there when the bullets were whizzing by, and gang violence and crack cocaine took over my neighborhood.

Ultimately, a supermajority of council members bowed to activist pressure, imposing an expensive rehabilitation of the property on the owner. Activists noted that Austin and Texas offer generous benefits for historic landmarks, including tax breaks and grants—a partial recognition that the costs of social aims are not necessarily borne by those who seek them—but it’s also a failure to recognize that slapping a historic designation on a building doesn’t magically bring it back to life. Like other “historic” landmarks in our neighborhood, the owner will likely do the legal minimum required—then leave it vacant until rents rise to justify further work, when it will inevitably become a Lululemon or artisanal juice bar. You know, something that reflects the historic character of the neighborhood.

When, last week, another such case came before Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission, of which I’m a member, I voted against it, noting my discomfort “given some of the more recent (Historic Landmark Commission)-forced rezonings, that this will become a means of preventing sensible development from happening in the future.”

Because in the end, that’s what this is about.

Forced historic landmarking is not a preservation tool but an anti-development tool, one that seeks to ossify the shape of the past in defiance of the needs of the future.

I am all for preserving historic buildings—but not in blithe evasion of the real financial and opportunity costs of doing so, not when it is forced, and certainly not ex post facto. If cities wish to incentivize the voluntary preservation of certain structures, they should also consider the extent to which such incentives end up being tax breaks for the wealthy who can afford the cost of maintaining them—or whether it’s worth spending taxpayer funds to appease aesthetic preferences while doing nothing to address whether people can afford to live in a museum city. I get the impulse in a place like Austin, where there is so little physical history left to preserve and when the racial history is so fraught. But coercive historic zoning—a “taking” by another name—is the wrong way to go about it. It not only robs property owners of the right to use their property, it robs a city of its ability to evolve with the times.

Forced preservation is a perverse way to honor the past.

Indeed, the property in my neighborhood sits on a much larger lot that could have become a fairly good-sized apartment building with ground-floor amenities—including guaranteed affordable units, which would have done far more to prevent displacement than an empty building. Now, nobody will ever live there. The building will remain a hollow shell, a monument to a sorry past and a squandered opportunity. This is incredibly ironic—and tragic—because many of the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents were dispossessed of their private property when their forebears were forcibly segregated into this part of town almost a century ago.

In all our efforts to preserve the past, we never seem to learn anything from it: forced historic preservation doesn’t pay for itself—it only steals from the future.

How do you think we should preserve historic buildings?