Historic District Designation Research Articles

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

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...

The political economy of historic districts: The private, the public, and the collective

This paper studies the political economy of historic district designation, with a focus on how historic district designation influences housing prices. I provide transaction-level empirical evidence from Denver, Colorado from 1990 to 2016 using hedonic price models with multiple fixed-effects. Results suggest that being in a historic district generates a 12–23% premium for house transactions after designation. Given the institutional context of Denver, I argue that one possible mechanism of the premium is the collective action problem in the historic district designation process. Meanwhile, a 10–20% positive spillover to the neighboring homes of historic districts is found, and the specific characteristics of historic districts influence the spillovers.

The Price of Preserving Neighborhoods: The Unequal Impacts of Historic District Designation

Policies affecting cultural assets are popular yet imperfectly understood tools to shape local economic development. Historic preservation policies, for example, can have markedly different implica...

The Price of Preserving Neighborhoods: The Unequal Impacts of Historic District Designation

Policies affecting cultural assets are popular yet imperfectly understood tools to shape local economic development. Historic preservation policies, for example, can have markedly different implications for original residents, prospective residents, and developers, even in the same city. Therefore, merely identifying its average effect can obscure important heterogeneity in its impact. This study examines the property value impacts of local and national historic districts across the distribution of property prices and how those differential impacts vary with the restrictiveness of the policy. A quantile regression model identifies the heterogeneity of effects among higher and lower end properties. The results reveal large differences between national and local districts, interior and buffer properties, and for different property values. These findings highlight the importance of and complexity in how housing markets react to attempts to guide local economic development.

The many dimensions of historic preservation value: national and local designation, internal and external policy effects

This analysis examines the internal and external policy effects of national and local register programmes for historic preservation. Robust hedonic pricing models are crucial to informing policy proposals and understanding how property markets relate to urban heritage. Estimating a repeat-sales hedonic model with neighbourhood trends and spatial mixed models, novel to this literature, offers a marked improvement in terms of jointly identifying internal and external policy effects, comparing national and local designations, separating policy from heritage effects and estimating models robust to spatial dependence and trends in hedonic prices. Historic designation variables, while often individually insignificant in the model, are always jointly significant in explaining varying appreciation rates. Local districts exhibit no consistent price impacts across the models. Being located inside a national district confers a price premium that increases over time in the preferred model specification, while prices fall in national districts’ buffers after designation. The sensitivity of results to model specification raises questions about alternative approaches to spatial dependence in the data in the urban historic preservation context. Evidence of the influence of historic district designation on property turnover and renovation investments is also examined.

The impacts of historic districts on residential property land values in Australia

PurposeFocusing on the externality effects of historic districts, this paper aims to assess and compare the impact of historic district designation on the value of residential vacant land property.Design/methodology/approachHedonic regression is used to analyze data from 4,233 residential vacant site transactions to measure the influence of historic district designation on the price of residential vacant site properties.FindingsResults support established theory and research on other residential property types, showing a significant and positive relationship between designation in a historic district and property prices. Residential vacant sites located in a designated historic district sold at a 10-11 per cent premium compared to similar vacant sites not located in a historic district.Originality/valueThis is the first empirical study of the influence of historic districts on residential vacant land property. The paper extends limited previous literature on the externality effects of historic districts through detailed analysis of a large Australian housing market (Brisbane).

Urban Preservation and Renewal

This article takes up the creation of Boston’s Beacon Hill historic district during the 1950s as a significant chapter of preservation planning history. Inspired by similar efforts in the South, this campaign succeeded in a decade commonly associated with conformity and consensus, suburbia and urban renewal, obsolescence and progress. Activists on Beacon Hill persuaded their neighbors and city and state officials that the heretofore little-used technique of historic district designation should be employed in a big, northern industrial city. In so doing, they led the way for the more widespread historic preservation movement that followed during the 1960s and 1970s.

Does Preservation Accelerate Neighborhood Change? Examining the Impact of Historic Preservation in New York City

Problem, research strategy, and findings: A number of studies have examined the property value impacts of historic preservation, but few have considered how preservation shapes neighborhood composition. In this study, we ask whether the designation of historic districts contributes to changes in the racial composition and socioeconomic status of New York City neighborhoods. Bringing together data on historic districts with a panel of census tracts, we study how neighborhoods change after the designation of a historic district. We find little evidence of changes in the racial composition of a neighborhood, but report a significant increase in socioeconomic status following historic designation.Takeaway for practice: Our research offers empirical evidence on changes in the racial composition and socioeconomic status of neighborhoods following the designation of a historic district. It suggests that historic preservation can contribute to economic revitalization in urban neighborhoods, but that these changes risk making neighborhoods less accessible to lower-income residents. Planners should consider ways that the city government can work to preserve the highly valued amenities of historic neighborhoods while mitigating the potential for residential displacement.

The impact of historic district designation on the prices of single-family homes in the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, Florida

This empirical investigation applies a hedonic pricing model to estimate how much historic district designation has influenced the sales price of single-family houses in the oldest city in the United States, namely, St. Augustine, Florida. There were sufficient data in this context to study a total of 4017 single-family houses for a 6-year period from 2008 to 2013. The semi-log and piecewise regression estimations reveal that the natural log of the sales price of a single-family house in the city of St. Augustine was positively affected by designation as national historic district in six of the seven districts, with robust results obtained for five of the districts. Moreover, the estimated premiums for historic designation were larger than those found in other similar studies, most of which were conducted prior to the Great Recession. This study also derives several other conclusions about the effects of recession variables, as well as other exterior characteristics, interior characteristics and spatial control variables, a number of which are not commonly explored in similar studies.

Historic District Influence on House Prices and Marketing Duration

Historic property designations have been lauded for spurring renovation beyond the historic structures themselves through positive externalities in surrounding neighborhoods. Previous historic district research focuses on whether historic designation results in a price premium. This paper takes a more comprehensive look at the buying process, which must consider marketing duration within the historic district as well as influences on the sale of properties adjacent to the historic district. We examine how historic district designation in Baton Rogue, Louisiana is capitalized either through a price premium or marketing duration and how that mechanism differs between neighborhoods inside and outside the historic district boundaries. We employ a three stage least square, 3SLS, model to account for the effects of endogenous marketing duration on price capitalization estimates. The estimates are consistent with search-market theory in that marketing duration absorbs part of the capitalization of historic designation. We find that the more certain benefits from historic designation within the district are reflected in a price premium while the reduced regulation coupled with the cachet of being located near but not inside the district result in shorter marketing duration.

Four Decades of Local Historic District Designation: A Case Study of Newport, Rhode Island

Abstract For over forty years, Newport, Rhode Island has sought to preserve much of the city's historic architecture through a local preservation by-law. The work of the Newport Historic District Commission, comprised of volunteer residents appointed by the local city council, has dominated the city's historic preservation values and approach. Not uncommon to many preservation efforts, the emphasis has been almost exclusively on aesthetic rather than contextual values, and has resulted in local practice and preferences that often overlook the associative significance of local historic and cultural resources. This paper seeks to examine the genesis and impact of this approach to historic preservation efforts in Newport.

Historic Preservation and Residential Property Values: An Analysis of Texas Cities

Designation of historic districts is increasingly used as a tool to revive or halt the deterioration of central-city neighbourhoods. While historic designation is generally thought to have a positive impact on property values, evidence on this issue is mixed. One limitation of previous research is that it typically focuses on historic neighbourhoods in one city and thus bases its conclusions on a very limited sample. This study expands upon previous work by examining the effects of designation on property values across a larger set of cities. The study employs hedonic regression models to estimate housing prices in historic districts and comparable neighbourhoods in nine Texas cities. Results suggest that, in most cases, historic designation is associated with higher property values.

The Internal and External Impact of Historical Designation on Property Values

Designation of historic properties and historic districts is increasingly used as a means to revive central city neighborhoods and to promote urban economic development. While preservation activities are thought to generate positive externalities for surrounding neighborhoods, these external effects have been difficult to quantify. Using a database of tax appraisal records for residential properties in Abilene, Texas, this study demonstates that there are significant, positive externalities associated with historic designation. We perform simple cost-benefit calculations and find that the internal and external benefits more than outweigh the (non-zero) costs associated with historical designation. Moreover, from the city of Abilene's perspective the property tax incentives provided to historic reinvestment are outweighed by the added property tax revenue created by the increased value.

The Impact of Historic District Designation on Property Values: An Empirical Study

It is often thought that historic preservation and economic interests are competing values. This case study of a large Chicago neighborhood provides evidence that National Historic District designation was beneficial to properties in the district. Substantial external benefits were also found. The designation of two smaller areas within the study area as Chicago Historic Districts had a negative effect on property values, however, indicating that the impact depends on the restrictions imposed by preservation measures.

The Impacts of Historic District Designation Planning and Policy Implications

Abstract The designation of historic districts in residential neighborhoods has grown in popularity in the United States over the past two decades. Many planners have embraced designation policies as tools in the management of neighborhood preservation and revitalization. However, opposition has arisen in some cases based on the assertion that official designation could accelerate property values, thus increasing tax liabilities and rents and leading to rising displacement of low-income and elderly households. Existing research provides only a few insights into this issue. An analysis of residential historic district designation in Washington, DC, finds little support for the displacement threat. Further research is necessary on the timing of designation and the intervening effects of the federal historic preservation tax credit.

Revitalizing Minority Commercial Areas through Commercial Historic District Designation: A Case Study of Atlanta, Georgia

Historic preservation is one way cities can stimulate the economies of lagging or distressed areas. Owners of commercial properties in historic districts enjoy federal and local tax incentives, gra...

The Effect of Historic District Designation on Single‐Family Home Prices

The designation and regulation of local historic districts in Baltimore, Maryland started in 1964. Structures within these districts are required to maintain exteriors in the style of the historical significance of the neighborhoods. Prior studies in other cities have shown that the designation did not always lead to an increase in restoration activities in these areas. This paper analyzes the effect of the designation on transaction prices and finds historic districts do have higher prices than identical non‐historic districts.

WHY PLACES ARE PRESERVED: HISTORIC DISTRICTS IN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN CITIES

This paper presents historic preservation as a movement caught up in issues and conflicts that are ordinary and serious concerns for many Americans and Europeans. It examines rationales for the designation of historic districts in five metropolitan areas: London, Paris, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. One rationale for historic preservation that is of interest to geographers-enhancing a sense of place-was found to be especially important but in need of further discussion in most historic districts. The role of historic preservation in these study areas is much broader and less elitist or antiquarian than has been suggested in many interpretations of the preservation movement.