Re// HISTORIC PRESERVATION 411: 3 Linked Posts

Don't know about anyone else, but when your MesaZona blogger hears or reads the word "preservation" there's an olfactory memory of strong smells of formaldehyde, biological specimens crammed into glass jars, dusty dark places and things stuck between yellowed pages all dried-up and discolored with no hint of their lives or glories. So let's strike that word from the lexicon used on this blog and insert the word REGENERATION in its place.

Back on 13 January there's a featured post: The Economics of Historic Preservation: Lessons Learned . Please take the time to scroll down and take a look ...

The City of Mesa to its credit has an Historic Preservation Board that's doing some good things . . . but why the big push now for historic preservation ten years after the stunning new International Design Award-winning Mesa Arts Center was built in 2005, with it taking until 2014 for a residential design award-winning apartment complex to get built that was the first new housing in downtown in 30 years. In that interim timespan many historic homes and properties got some overdue attention and historic districts were organized and approved after years going through the approval process to keep what is unique. 

With reference to that here are two more resource articles recently published:
1. The Case Against Historic Preservation
2. Historic Preservation - Treating the Symptom Instead of the Cause

Both are written by Andrew Rice
Andrew Price has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2013 and is a founding member of the organization. Andrew is a software developer by day and an urbanist by night. He is passionate about traditional urbanism – he believes in fine-grained, highly walkable places that are built for people. He grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States with his wife. Andrew is a regular contributor on Strong Towns and runs his own blog, andrewalexanderprice.com. You can find many of his photographs throughout the Strong Towns website. Andrew’s motivation to be involved in Strong Towns and urbanism is to create a great place that he and his wife, and one day their children and their future generations will want to call home.
Readers can get the gist of his article Historic Preservation - Treating the Symptom Instead of the Cause published that was published today 31 Jan 2017 in his first and last paragraphs:

Introduction: Does this all sound way too familiar here in Mesa?

"There are two kinds of historic preservation - the kind archaeologists care about where you are preserving the artifacts of an earlier civilization, and the kind the city council is interested in at the local level. We'll be discussing the latter here. (You can read about my earlier thoughts on historic preservation in The Case Against Historical Districts.)

The primary motivation of historic preservation is to prevent something from being replaced by something worse. "Worse" is subjective, and depending on the context, could mean replacing a beautiful ornate building with a glass tower, replacing a simple two story brick building with a parking lot, or the modernization of an entire city district.

Hollowing Out

Cities and neighborhoods are not always in a state of continuous growth. When a city grows and the number of residents and businesses in the city increases, the number of housing units and floorspace for offices, retail, industry, and other uses must increase to accommodate the additional demand.
When the population decreases, it contracts. There are many ways the contraction can play out, but it could look something like this: property owners can’t find enough tenants, so the upper floors are abandoned. Eventually, rents fall so low that that the owner is collecting less revenue than what it costs to do basic maintenance on the building, so they want to get rid of the building. To stop losing money, the owner either abandons the building or sells it. If the building is sold, the new owner might think think that it is worth more to them as a parking lot than a vacant building not bringing in any money. If the building is abandoned, it deteriorates beyond repair and is eventually bulldozed. Regardless of how this scenario plays out, the net result is that it shrinks the supply of unneeded floor space in the city. This can either happen at the neighborhood level (everyone flees a former bustling neighborhood to the newly built suburbs) or even at the city level.

Conclusion:
"I believe there is a time and a place for historic preservation. When a particular site plays a role in history or is such a recognizable landmark, and a developer wants to tear it down or abandon it, then we have a justifiable case for preserving it. But, in most cases I believe that historic preservation is a pill for treating a symptom rather than curing the cause. We have a shortage of high quality urban places not just in the United States, but globally, and I think modernity (which includes suburbanization, modern city planning, and modern architecture) plays a huge role in this shortage. Because there is a shortage, we so desperately hold on to the places that remain. But instead, I think we should focus our efforts on tackling the underlying problem. If we were building more lovable, fine-grain, human-scale places to replace those that were lost or redeveloped, there would be very little reason to focus so much effort on historic preservation."

Link to entire article Strongtowns.org

A recent adaptive re-use for The Alhambra Hotel, on the National Register of Historic Places in an adaptive re-use to a residence hall for Benedictine University students in The New Urban Downtown Mesa