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Overheard in D.C.: Careful What You Wish For
by DCist Tech Director Tom Lee
At just over ten thousand words, Larry Van Dyne's Washingtonian article about the history of historic preservation in the District is indisputably thorough. But just about everything else about the article is up for debate. Despite his comprehensive accounting, Van Dyne is careful not to express an opinion of his own — although a reader will inevitably develop her own, if only because of the piece's length. Faced with a list of preservation projects that somehow manages to include two steakhouses, even the most sentimental architecture fan could be forgiven for thinking that this all seems like a hell of a lot of historic preservation.
Of course, after an election season spent listening to the same stupid joke about grizzly bear DNA testing over and over, I'm hesitant to rely on this sort of context-free line item gotchas — maybe they really are particularly culturally significant steakhouses. But those buildings' specific merits aside, it is easy to see how the impulse toward historical preservation can, or could, get out of hand. I've got some pack-rat tendencies myself: when faced with some piece of the cherished past — say, my groundbreaking first-grade report on armadillos — it's never hard to come up with reasons why it would be nice to save it.
But this impulse can become problematic when applied to buildings. Not only are the immediate costs associated with preserving a building vastly larger than for other items of artistic or historical interest, but the future cost of preservation is often overlooked. Thanks to the city's height restriction, D.C. is already unusually short on usefully-located building space. Writing off desirable plots of land like the one occupied by the Christian Science Church from contributing to the city's economic, housing and social needs — forever, in theory — is a sufficiently extreme measure that we should approach it with extreme caution. Trading that much productive capacity for vaguely-defined cultural and aesthetic benefits ought to make anyone wary.
Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user ElvertBarnes
Still, I don't mean to make real estate development sound like an unalloyed good. A couple of weeks ago I was in Houston, a city that's been built without zoning. The resulting product of unfettered entrepreneurial enthusiasm is closer to a plot for an especially ironic episode of The Twilight Zone than it is an explicit argument about land use, but for my purposes it'll do. I have no doubt that, left to their own devices, D.C.'s developers would construct a hellscape every bit as tacky and unlivable as Houston's. (I'm still sore about those video billboards in Chinatown and the developer's response when confronted about their blaring soundtrack: he said he was trying to emulate the sophisticated big city experience of Times Square — where, incidentally, the billboards don't actually talk).
In the end, I'm not sure that the current detente reached by area preservationists and developers is a bad one. Compromises like the townhouse facade at Red Lion Row seem like pretty good ideas — they let us keep some local exterior architectural ambience without paying the opportunity cost of a musty, unvisited interior manned by a bored attendant and an empty donation box. When entire buildings are worthy of preservation but too valuable to keep, we should try to move them to less valuable locations. If the goal is simply to maintain the city's aesthetic atmosphere, we should take advantage of developers' seemingly bottomless enthusiasm for building in this tight commercial market to extract exterior design concessions (and money to move the aforementioned buildings).
There's a balance to be struck, and although I didn't enjoy having to wait years for my landlord to replace some leaky and apparently-historical windows, on the whole it seems like D.C. has arrived at a reasonable set of attitudes about preserving its buildings. If we ever develop a more reasonable set of attitudes about how tall those buildings are allowed to be, perhaps the diminished crunch for downtown real estate will make it easier to justify the preservation of places like the Christian Scientists' brutalist masterpiece.
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Tom: Great post. One minor quibble: Houston is not actually what we'd get if there were no restrictions. Houston has no "zoning", but many other regulations force a suburban style of development. For example, all development is required to provide a certain (large) amount of mandatory parking. That makes building a suburban office tower surrounded by lots of parking much more economical than a more urban model, pushing buildings farther apart, and making people even more car-dependent, further ensuring that a car-oriented development pattern predominates.
Thanks! I appreciate the correction. And since you didn't, let me encourage readers interested in these issues to visit your site, a truly fantastic resource for discussions about the present and future of this city.
"he said he was trying to emulate the sophisticated big city experience of Times Square — where, incidentally, the billboards don't actually talk)."
Also, no one actually lives in Times Square, do they?
Nice articles, both of them.
I agree that there needs to be a balance between all of the competing interests in development and community planners. I disagree, strongly, that historic buildings on valuable parcels should just be moved to another location. Context and provenance are fundamental to the identity of the city. Our landmarks (w/ varying degrees of significance) shouldn't be likened to pieces of a puzzle that can be shuffled and reorganized. To do so rewrites and retells a disingenuous history of the city.
Historic Preservation is an important part of the overall planning strategy, but this building and the circumstances around it are the worst case scenario for those involved. Clearly it's historic, clearly it's ugly, clearly the land could be used more efficiently, clearly a new building here could be just as ugly and detrimental in other ways. This is really a lose-lose.
One weakness of this argument is the failure to build the argument based on DC's competitive advantages. I argue that three of the five advantages relate to history:
1. historic architecture
2. urban design hailing from the Walking City (1800-1890) and Transit City (1890-1920) eras
3. history, identity, and authenticity.
(The other two are a rich transit infrastructure allowing for mobility that doesn't require the car and the steady employment engine of the federal govt.)
If you agree that uniqueness and autheniticy, or the value of place is what distinguishes successful communities from failures (a la the Richard Florida and Jane Jacob arguments), then making over DC into anyplace diminishes the city's unique qualities.
There are opportunity costs to preservation sure, but at the same time there are opportunity benefits, including saving the city during the long almost 45 year period when for the most part, the only people with income who wanted to live in cities were urban pioneers.
Speaking of opportunity benefits, generally homes in historic districts are worth more, retain property values better, the neighborhoods are safer and have fewer vacancies, compared to similar neighborhoods that are not designated.
And you can't mix the height restriction argument with historic preservation and consider both to be equal. They are very different policies. Sure the height restriction supports historic preservation objectives, but both laws come from different places.
In fact, as an ardent preservationist, I argue that the height restriction puts undue pressure on historic neighborhoods for conversion to office districts, because the Central Business District can't grow up, so it grows out and reproduces neighborhoods abutting the continually expanding CBD.
Center city competitive advantage rests on place advantages. Unlike the malls (see http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2111) DC is real.
Don't destroy the real to become polycentric urban sameness nirvana a la Houston.
Recognize DC's competitive advantages and strengthen these advantages going forward, rather than destroy them.