Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn by Aaron Passell Kevin P. Block (bio) Aaron Passell Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn New York: Columbia University Press, 2021 272 pages, 2 black-and-white photographs, 19 figures ISBN: 9780231194075, $35 PB ISBN: 9780231194068, $120 HC ISBN: 9780231550635, $29.99 EB In cities across the United States, vernacular structures of all kinds—from row houses and churches to vacant factories and schools— exist within urban landscapes of opportunity and decline. Often the preservation of these structures for study, rehabilitation, or adaptive reuse depends upon the protections and financial incentives associated with historic district designation. For this reason alone, the relationship between historic districts and neighborhood change should interest readers of Buildings & Landscapes, whether or not they are professional preservationists. In Preserving Neighborhoods, author Aaron Passell compares the effects of historic district designations in Baltimore and Brooklyn, which he views as the polar ends of a contemporary urban growth spectrum. Baltimore is a legacy city in which preservationists and commercial developers have created historic districts to access rehabilitation tax credits and revitalize neighborhoods such as Canton and Locust Point. Brooklyn, in contrast, is now a global city in which members of volunteer community organizations utilize historic district protections and review procedures to fortify their neighborhoods from the adverse effects of intense speculative development and what urban historians now categorize as “super-gentrification.”1 Writing as a sociologist rather than a preservationist, Passell is careful to describe the basic mechanics and implications of historic districting, which should make his analysis accessible to a wide variety of readers, including students in urban studies, architectural and cultural landscape studies, public history, and planning courses. Understanding what exactly constitutes Passell’s sociological framework, however, might be difficult for some readers, although he briefly attempts to address this framework in the book’s introduction. From Harvey Molotch, for example, Passell assumes that the city is fundamentally a “growth machine,” controlled by members of a land-based elite who are interested in maximizing the exchange value of their property, with government authorities serving to coordinate their interests.2 He also follows a lineage of urban sociologists who are interested in the neighborhood as a metonym for all those contextual factors beyond the family that reproduce differences in life outcomes. To define a neighborhood and control its development with a preservation planning tool such as a historic district is thus one way to perpetuate or disrupt the enduring effects that are correlated with a given place.3 Pas-sell’s sociological analysis of historic districts is a welcome addition to the field because— while there are already assessments of historic districts from the perspective of public history and the history of preservation, as well as several in-depth historical accounts of the gentrification–preservation nexus in particular cities (including Brooklyn)—few authors have possessed both the quantitative and ethnographic skills necessary to create a compelling model of the historic districting process as a whole.4 Following a “kaleidoscopic approach” that combines extensive statistical analysis with qualitative interviews, Passell develops his comparison over four chapters that alternate between Baltimore and Brooklyn (212). He highlights the book’s major conclusion in his introduction: Contra the preservation skeptics, the author has found no evidence of a direct relationship between historic district designation and gentrification. “What preservation does,” he writes, “depends substantially on where it is doing it and the particular history and contemporary conditions of that place” (1). Passell characterizes this claim as “radically contingent” (2), with variability depending upon “the age of the city, its demographic composition (and racial history), its redevelopment history, the strength (or weakness) of the real estate market, and who is involved in the preservation process, among other things” (8). For the philosophically adventurous, one might also characterize his account as nominalist. Although municipalities often copy the same preservation legislation verbatim and adopt similar rationales for historical significance, historic districts do different things in different places and thus “the historic district,” in a universalist sense, does not exist, only the social process of historic districting in all its manifold particularity. This insistence upon, or...