Gentrification and Historic Preservation
Taking a Closer Look at Gentrification Relating to Historic Preservation
By Heather MacIntosh, Preservation Advocate
Gentrification has a lot of connotations. For some, it's just economic revitalization of neighborhoods. For others, it's tantamount to a domestic class war. For most, gentrification is both good and bad, an extremely complex and touchy subject, and an issue difficult to manage at a governmental level.
Parallel Courses
In the 1960s, historic preservation, as a public policy, a movement, and a profession, crystallized in the US in response to nationwide urban renewal efforts that removed large "blighted" sections of cities, and the communities who lived there affordably. Rather than clean up and improve historic neighborhoods, many cities chose to clear megablocks for the construction of high-rise projects. The destruction of community, human scale neighborhoods, and the hyper-density of high rises soon proved to be a huge mistake.
Thankfully, Seattle did not opt for a comprehensive clean slate. Pioneer Square, a neighborhood home to a large concentration of single-room-occupancy buildings since the late 19th century, was preserved, although no incentive programs or public policies that may have helped maintain affordable housing in Pioneer Square complemented these early preservation efforts. Though affordable housing tax credits for historic preservation projects have since come into being, development has opted for market rate housing or office use in both old and new construction.
The construction of I-5 led to the demolition of hundreds of historic affordable housing units in the 1960s. Hundreds more were demolished in the 1980s and 90s downtown, to allow for construction of high-rise office towers and civic buildings like Benaroya Hall. In neighborhoods like Belltown and Fremont, which developed from working class to artist/alternative communities to havens for young urban professionals, some historic housing stock remains, but is hardly affordable.
Balancing historic preservation and community preservation with revitalization and redevelopment is a goal of both historic preservation and community programs that might be considered "anti-gentrification" in spirit. In Seattle, most residents are concerned by the sharp rise in housing costs, and the disparity between median incomes and housing rates.
Reaching a Balance
Sensitive revitalization cannot occur without leadership and participation from the community. Any program, no matter how good in theory, will not work without community support and engagement during the earliest planning stages. Programs for revitalization, which includes historic preservation, have to satisfy the needs of the community, not a comprehensive plan or a single political agenda.
What would a balanced revitalization effort look like? It will have to be supported by nonprofits, community groups, local schools, and city government. It has to make financial sense to existing property owners, which may mean some initial subsidy or grant funding. There have to be good, mutually beneficial systems of support to provide technical and financial assistance.
Current Programs
Efforts to revitalize communities, while at the same time preserving affordable housing are already underway throughout the city. The earthquake pushed forward a program developed by the Department of Housing that would use Fannie Mae funding to encourage affordable housing redevelopment in the International District and Pioneer Square. The National Parks Service and the IRS jointly administer a tax credit program that benefits property owners who rehabilitate historic buildings into affordable housing. The King County Assessors office administers a special valuation incentive, along with support from the Department of Neighborhoods, that provides substantial tax relief for property owners who sensitively redevelop income-earning historic properties.
The Neighborhood Matching Grant program is designed in a way that would allow for secondary support for revitalization efforts grounded in community works, such as park development or improvement, public art projects, and heritage projects. Current preservation funds are meager, but if combined with other economic development and affordable housing programs could (and have) gone a long way toward small solutions.
What do the 2001 Mayoral Candidates think about the Gentrification and Historic Preservation?
The following is an excerpt from the October 2nd Mayoral Candidates Forum on Historic Preservation co-sponsored by Historic Seattle. To read the entire transcript, click here.
Walt Crowley (moderator) One of the concerns with historic preservation over this city's experience, and other city's, is that it has sometimes come at the expense of social and economic diversity. You end up gentrifying in the process of historic preservation, you lose the ethnic and economic variety in the neighborhood and you may actually end up reducing low-income housing stock. Any strategies for minimizing, eliminating, reversing those unintended effects?
Greg Nickels: Clearly, gentrification is occurring in our city, and I think it is a very serious problem. We have historic communities of people who no longer can afford to live in neighborhoods they have for many, many generations, and I think that is a problem. I don't chock that problem up to historic preservation, in fact I think in some ways by preserving and upgrading and restoring the housing in a neighborhood you can keep the prices more affordable than when new construction comes into a neighborhood. But that's going to be a real challenge to the next mayor to find out how we do encourage continual investment in our neighborhoods, I mean that's a good thing.
We want to see our city as a living, breathing, dynamic organism and we want to see it continually renewing itself, that's good and positive, But we want to make sure that it doesn't come at the expense of people who have historically lived here. So, for instance, when we build the light rail system in the Rainier Valley, I think it is very important that we do so in a way that reinvests in the community, that we are making sure that people who live in Rainier Valley can work on the project. It will create over 4200 jobs, those will be high paid family wage. Perhaps we can link these opportunities to people who live there, and give them a chance to continue to live there as the property values increase because of the public investment in those neighborhoods. Those are the kind of techniques that I'll use.
Mark Sidran: I think it's a huge challenge because cities are living organisms. They reinvent themselves, they change or they die, and the only thing worse than a city that's changing and improving and growing is a city that's doing the opposite of those things. It gets back to something I mentioned earlier. Historic preservation costs money. In order to do historic preservation, you must generate the money to make it possible to maintain or restore buildings. That requires economic activity that ultimately requires some form of rents and business activity, and you get caught in this cycle of economic growth and development, driving up costs necessary to sustain the improvements and it does result in a change in the affordability of neighborhoods.
I think we have to continue to try to explore ways to mitigate that impact and it's not an easy thing to do. We have found out, throughout the city, when you begin improve properties which is necessary to preserve them, you have to find ways to bear those costs. I would hope that as we look at different neighborhoods in Seattle we can find ways to mitigate that impact so we maintain diversity, racial and ethnic diversity. But it's a huge challenge. I don't think we should delude ourselves. That you can replace (a property owner like) Sam Israel, who, because of his neglect, preserved buildings and kept rents down, and so on. (This activity) had collateral consequences that were negative for some of the neighborhood, and then you have a successor owner landlord, Samus, who is investing a great deal of money in preserving buildings and making things better. But those things have to be paid for. It's a real challenge. The best the city can do, as it has in the past, is to work with other entities to make sure that there are housing and other opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to live there.