How NIMBYs weaponize historic districts

I think certain cities do it partially right. Like the city of Savannah I love visiting. Because they have a bunch of old historical Buildings that are now businesses. So they're being used by businesses that are used by businesses that are usually local. But I've also been to Charleston where some of their historical buildings are open. But a lot of it is just private buildings. They can only see the outside of and it's like. I would love to see some of close but it's also expensive place to just stay at because they don't allow New hotels to be built. Compared to the city of savannah which is It's a similar city concerned about the colonial cities and it has more hotels in its historic district

It's the same guy that would have a conniption fit if some black people on section 8 moved in next door

Can you make a video on India's failed smart cities mission?

I don’t even think historic buildings are even worth keeping unless it brings tourism money. Cities should not be stuck in mid 20th century that are barely upkeep. Americans travel overseas to take a break from poorly designed infrastructure and visit like Paris, mastic etc then move back to their GM-Ford occupied cities

Historic district argument in bullshit. The metro in Mumbai goes down through Colaba Causeway. It's not destroying old building of course, but there will be a metro there.

There is a lot to unpack here. The sad truth like you said is that most people only find the most notable buildings worth saving. If a building has lost most of its defining characteristics the odds of it being saved from a theoretical demolition are slim to none. That, by default, makes preservation seem racist and elitist. That’s not what it’s supposed to be but that’s what an older generation has made it. There are many reasons why preservation is a good thing from an environmental perspective.

As a preservationist who works in the field, there is a troubling amount of near misinformation here

I'm studying historic preservation academically and I enjoyed this video. This kind of stuff is a cautionary tale in the field, and we certainly scrutinize it.
I do have a bit of an opposite perspective though. I'm from a rural town that's extremely historically significant - multiple U.S. presidents had property or vacationed there - and it has a historic district but no legal enforcement of any kind, and through demolition and extremely heavy-handed renovation, the history has been disappearing at an alarming rate. The housing market situations over the past few years have led wealthy people from urban areas to buy up the property and demolish the houses, or renovate them so heavily that they may as well have been demolished (i.e., an HGTV-grade flip). A few years ago the town attempted to institute legal protections, and the political situation turned into much the opposite of the more suburban situation depicted in the video. The wealthy, NIMBY-ish people opposed the protections, while the more long-time residents and most of the small, tourism-oriented business owners supported the protections. It ended up failing, and three more historic structures have been lost since, bringing the town very close to losing its historic district and continuing to erode its historical narrative and tourism potential.

Not wanting to crowd a neighborhood with multifamily dwellings is understandable IMO, but as the population ages more people may be looking into multigenerational households and duplexes seem like a good way to have that.

Sometimes, historic districts bring needed protection to the long standing character of an established neighborhood.
I live in an older neighborhood - mostly bungalow style houses built circa 1915-1925. Recently a real estate speculator bought an existing & charming one story house. Cost of lot is $495,000, cost of house was $451,000. He bulldozed down the house & is erecting a 4,000 square foot ultramodern 3 story mega house selling for $2.2 million. One side of the new house has a 3 story blank wall placed as close to his neighbor's house as it can go, blocking off southern exposure/sunlight from the rooms of the neighbor's house. So the developer can throw a perfectly good house into the landfill & lose the $451,000 value, but recoup the loss by building a mega house. If this trend continues, it will destroy the supply of smaller homes & drive up costs as speculators buy up land in our neighborhood. An historic district designation will create limits on out of scale houses.

I'm so sorry for systematic racism and the way blacks have come to look at themselves as ugly in the mirror.

No one put a gun to their heads and forced them to smoke crack.

I would also have to add that if you from the hood and ghetto and you got $200 Jordan's on and late on child support. You might have an issue with your morals.

nimbys are really poorly named imo. Its almost never about "my backyard" and always about "my neighbors backyard"

Is not that they "kicked out" the black folks. Developers renovate these mansions in places like Charleston and sell them for millions. And the only people that can afford them is rich white families because that's who holds most of the wealth in the US. if you want to live in a nice area, you have to have money, regardless of your race....

I see zero problem here.

Very interesting topic. I have a question about the neighborhood in Philly: how did the density reduce by half? Did they destroy buildings?

These historical districts should not be permanent they should be put up for review regularly to ensure that the designation is still relevant. Sometimes the needs of the city are more important than whatever historical value that district might have.

You played right on the fence in this video.

Its ironic how many historic districts still existed in a “timeless” way because they were typically considered low-class. Less investment meant less change.

Thanks for highlighting the racist and classist implications of historic districts. Good point asking whose and which history is being saved. Spoiler alert, it's the usual suspects.

Wait? Does it not need to actually be historic?

My bad ! Oops

Hi Dave. Can you make a video on how good city planning helps in law enforcement or any video which relates city planning and law enforcement?

A few points I pose: Can a city become too full? Can a city say "sorry, we don't have space for more homes, we need to stop businesses from creating more jobs or people will be out of luck for finding a home nearby"? Is it a city's responsibility to make sure there is a home within the city limits for every person working in the city? Or is it on the owner to figure that out and maybe live in another city and commute further if that's the only option? Is the city responsible or is the individual? Generally people choose a neighborhood based on the idea that "This is the type of place we prefer and we aern't hoping it changes because we like it the way it is, that's why we moved here" So should a community or neighborhood be forced to deal with their neighborhood changing if they don't want it to?

Why is gentrification seen as bad because it changes a neighborhood and hides it's history, but its ok to change a different type of neighborhood and hide it's history when you want to make it more dense? Some cities make the problem worse by welcoming and not regulating illegal immigrants or refugees as well as they could and this is on top of the legal immigrants and out of towners moving in for work etc. with no plan on how to house or feed them except to force others to "share". "Let these refugees stay in your home/hotel. We know you didn't vote on it and won't be helped much or at all financially and they may even destroy your property but oh well, they need somewhere to stay." We've seen that! "We're gonna let investors buy out all your neighbors to tear down historic buildings that look beautiful to make room for duplexes and high rises." We see that also.

Some of the arguments for dense urbanization sometimes come off as such: "Zoning is rooted in racism and segregation! Don't you know more people want to live here? How dare people not willingly give up their space! How dare people fight to keep their home value up! Who needs an acre? Much less 5? Don't they know other people want to live on their land? Who cares if your property value goes down? Who cares if the city doesn't have more room without taking it from others? What are they trying to do? Maintain rich community and history? Have more space and autonomy? Have better health? Raise a family in optimal conditions? Sounds like extremism to me!"

In Toronto, historic homes are routinely torn down and replaced with ugly modernist homes that are usually no larger than the original house. They do it to boost property values and sell the newly built homes for more money. So that's one case where historic preservation laws aren't enforced nearly enough.

The story of the demolition of the original Penn station breaks my heart. It's almost too painful to watch.

Build new cities. There's tons of space in the world to be occupied. If you buy an expensive house in a neighborhood with certain characteristics you don't want a bunch of poor people moving next door. It's perfectly justifiable and saying you "need to save the homeless" isn't a valid argument because there's tons of "cheap areas" that could be revitalized by "projects". Instead, money isn't spent there until some people come and decide to gentrify those areas too, kicking out the remaining poor people from there as well. Poor people aren't poor only out of bad luck, but they also have a much lower "effort level" and we (the poor) deserve to live a sh*tty life because we didn't work harder to move into a nice suburban house.

Why don't you compare this with what you can see in Russia and Cuba? Would you rather be there?

Your clip is ill informed and bigoted. I too want cities that are dynamic and grow to meet the needs of all people regardless of wealth, race of gender. Trashing historic neighbourhoods has nothing to do with achieving any of that. All the duplexes you want will be new and expensive - to expensive to buy costly to rent.. You will become a rent for lifer if you just want new. Old can be done up to a new excellent standard and will use less carbon and be cheaper. The problems of affordability for poor people are systemic problems in a capitalist economy and have nothing to do with blaming historic buildings and a false narrative about NIMBYs. Gain a class consciousness. Think on it.

I'm not American, but it almost physically hurts to see what Penn station was like and knowing we DELIBERATELY destroyed it. Every. Single. Time. It's hard, but definitely necessary to not let that feeling control me or others though.

The biggest problem imo is that many newer buildings, especially new apartments and townhouses, look absolutely awful in comparison to older apartments and townhouses.

Living in The Philadelphia area, I heard the story, accuracy unknown, that the Society Hill area was a slum. The then mayor decided to move in, possibly to prove a point. High minded people were horrified and decided to fix up what they could and demolish the rest. The Society Hill Towers sit on what couldn't be fixed. Again, I have no proof of the authenticity of this story, but it would make a good bit of lore.

This is a huge problem facing Auckland, NZ at the moment. The old streetcar suburbs closest to the city centre, with quality frequent bus routes, are all 'heritage protected' because of the low-density 1920s villas in that area. All the intensification has been forced into outlying car-dependent suburbs and greenfield developments, and it STILL ends up being car-dependent intensification with only half-hourly local bus routes serving these new areas.

So the city continues to sprawl, housing prices are still very high, the roads are still clogged up with cars - all because some selfish rich twats want to keep their inner suburbs permanently unchanging.

Ok I’m a meseam curator and historian hear so let’s give my take:
Having a variety of historical narratives and choice support something you should strive for. The issue comes from an understanding that many developers have for historic structures that seems to be negative in nature. For instance there seems to be an idea that history stops in 1940 or some arbitrary date which is not how history functions at all history is being made every day. Having architectural styles and cultural sites that relate to stuff representing today as well as only a few decades ago or even for the back is important for the cultural and larger understanding of the past that the public is interested in through preservation. I feel sometimes there’s this inside that you need to tear down everything old and build the same ugly new building over and over again and we should try to learn from the mistakes of the brutalist era. For every beautiful building that was destroyed to build a ugly concrete slab we might want to preserve some of these ugly concrete slabs to represent that style as well. It’s obvious from your video that people are abusing the system which makes sense. But I worry about attacking the system of preservation too much and allowing a scenario like I will describe in the next few sentences that happened to my own hometown. I live near Alexandria Virginia which is a very historic city with a very historic old town and historic district with very strict rules about changing anything that is historical. There was a building built by an African-American who was a freedmen during slavery history in the United States that was a cultural landmark in a further out section of the city. It was meant to be demolished building ugly five over one apartment complex not even condos.
(I have my issues with apartments and that they prevent the generation of wealth for new generations to increase their standing by owning property and rent being a scam to make people stay poor. Talk about that another time.)
This development company wanted to build this object and destroyed the building even with public outcry and demands for it to be preserved the city board simply ignored it stating that they needed to create more housing despite the cultural significance of it being an African-American owned home and built and counteracting a lot of the preserved colonial history buildings. By the color plates brought up they only stated that the paperwork wasn’t filled out so it had to be demolished because it wasn’t technically a historic building even though the community determined it to be one. That is the threat your face for corporations and the greed of development preventing the keeping of cultural landmarks as well as structures that tie us to our shared history of the past. Absolutely more cultural sites for everyone else that is not a rich white American need to be identified and preserved as well but it doesn’t mean we should start tearing down every single historic structure because it needs to change for the times that’s why we had the Penn station situation with that line of thinking. If there is no interest in actual preservation and they play themselves historic district there’s an issue but there’s an easy solution. That does not involve just tearing everything down. You can make it so for historic districts just like on Alexandria first work building you cannot change anything without prior approval or even do your own development changes that might take away from the historical impact of the house by doing that suburban neighborhood that just did it take themselves as a historic district will be unable to Stand them out of that control because they are anti-control people to begin with turning the tool against them to be a bigger irritant than using the tool against development is the answer. But perhaps some suburban houses from the 1950 should be preserved to represent the middle-class American story that existed from that era for us to interpret and teach just because it was closer in time doesn’t mean that it is not historically important for future generations to learn about it and say 50 or 70 years if we are to preserve historic structures for all for generations to come we have to make sure that we preserve them now as well and think about what should be preserved and what should not

This is what happens when the government runs the zoning.

He always complains when districts are or become “too white”.

When people stopped caring about historic districts in europe, they started building hideous buildings that dont fit in

Historic Preservation is not necessarily the same as an historic district.

I have a masters in historic preservation. I also think preserving the exteriors while providing a new use for an old building is better than demolishing the original building and replacing it.

I have no issue with change and adaptation to an existing historic structure but complete removal of it is an issue for me. It also goes against sustainability as it creates pollution and debris with every building demolished.

That being said, I wouldn’t stop someone from making some changes to an historic house or building but do your best to preserve the aesthetic of the historic building.

I do think historic district guidelines are sometimes way too broad and in some places not broad enough or aren’t covering signature structures just because they’re outside of the district. They also shouldn’t be used just to boost property values.

I think that if you’re going to build new in an historic district, try to mimic or honor the historic character of the street views, even if you don’t intend to have as traditional an interior or private side of your building.

If the state government wanted to fight back, I would make the process of changing anything on the property extremely rigorous with tons of paperwork. Want to replace a broken AC unit? Here’s 6 months of permits and approvals to go through.

Hey this building is old therefore its historic. Let save it. Meanwhile its faling over and rents are through the roof. We dont need housing for our children. They can live in tents on the street.

With all the damage NIMBYs have caused to our cities, they should be considered 'domestic terrorists'

Historic districts are few and far between and should be preserved as priority, build the disgustingly ugly new builds somewhere else…

Its always been easier to build on VIRGIN Land, then it is to REBUILD Land already developed.

We really do need more dense infrastructure

If it’s not serving the functional utility of the people who live there what’s the point of preserving it? Just cuz it’s old? If Penn Station was not turning a profit that means people aren’t using it. Why should a 3rd party be able to tell someone who owns the property what he or she can do with their own property? That would be like a 3rd party telling me who and at what price and whether I can sell my car to someone. NIMBYs cause housing prices to escalate in places like San Fran, most California and New York. NIMBYs simply shouldn’t have a say in what a person who is the actual owner can do with their own property. If I am the owner I should be able to demolish it and build anything my heart desires, without the peanut gallery of NIMBYs squawking about whether my new building is aesthetically pleasing, or some other frivolous reason.

My town doesnt want to urbanize but at the some time city running out of money and isnt affordable with bad transit stations and unlikely to get more busses

If we prioritized preservation over innovation, we would still be living in pre-industrial dwellings. The pyramids and some other man made wonders are worth preserving; the rest, give me a break

PennRR was already nearly bankrupt when they sold the air rights. I think tearing it down was more a fuck you to the citizens and their government that trillions spent on highways. Which killed passenger and cargo railroads.

I agree right most of this but the knee-jerk American egalitarianism creeps in as usual. You don’t think the better buildings, public and private, were commissioned by the rich? Architecture friendly to the masses is mostly a post-Bauhaus thing. Of course, the current mood ensures that all efforts will be made to pretend that it is otherwise.