Historical Preservation Ordinance
Introduction
The purpose of this ordinance is to address the inconsistencies in the current historic preservation zoning ordinance for the city of Philadelphia. The language drafted in the historical district act of 1961 makes clear its priorities to protect the distinct historical character of the city, as well as establish the rules and regulations for building, rehabilitating, and the demolition of sites appointed as such. In addition, the city’s preservation local zoning ordinance published within its public policy and purpose sections, the declaration to preserve buildings, structures, sites, and objects that are important to the culture, traditions, and economic values of the city. This policy included the promotion of a single city-wide process that would evaluate particular cases that fell outside of the zoning ordinance code or projects that would require community input if issues impacted the surrounding community. Unfortunately, this process was not delivered in the actions the city took against the century-old stables in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is a city unique to the concept and application of historic preservation, almost prototypical being one of the oldest cities in the nation and enriched with buildings of late architectural styles and complete with sites directly related to the American Revolutionary war. Yet, surprisingly among the twelve sites listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, outside of national landmarks, none pay homage to the battles of Philadelphia’s campaign in what historians deem as the heart of the revolution and America’s independence. While not surprising, is the lack of other culturally inclusive sites on the register, which makes for a greater argument towards what should have been, the rally for the preservation of the century-old public stalls on W. Fletcher Street.
Delayed Designations in ‘Demodelphia’
While the Philadelphia Historical Commission is one of the oldest preservation agencies of government established in 1955, it lacks the resources to appropriately assess and protect historical heritage. Both on a per number and per capita basis, the agency is insufficient in reviewing “a growing backlog of historic property nominations awaiting review by the Commission, including several proposed new historic districts in neighborhoods across the city with only a seven-person staff, while New Orleans, a city with one-quarter of the population of Philadelphia has a larger budget and more preservation staff. (Steinke, 2021) The city of Philadelphia also lags in historical preservation in comparison to other major cities across the nation:
“Currently, there are only approximately 10,000 historic buildings included on the local register, representing roughly 2.2% of the over 490,000 properties in Philadelphia.” (National Trust for Historic Preservation, September 2014) “Across 50 major cities in the U.S. there is an average total of 204,038 buildings per city. As compared to Philadelphia’s 2.2% of locally designated properties, the 50-city local designation average is nearly double, at 4.3%.” (National Trust for Historic Preservation, July 2017)
This margin deficit makes a greater impact on the amount of culturally diverse sites appointed because of the city's past. The city lost many of its historic homes in the urban renewal initiatives. The urban renewal programs of the ‘70s were defined by demolition, massive gentrification of traditional neighborhoods, and the lack of meaningful involvement by neighborhood residents…those programs contributed significantly to the creation of vacant lots and other blighted conditions. (Vitiello, 2007) Developers failed to understand the dynamics of poor people’s investment in their neighborhoods and “razed entire blocks in the name of ‘slum clearance’, leaving some lots vacant for decades when redevelopment projects failed to materialize.” (Mires, n.d) Planning often creates “wicked problems, with sacrificing one issue over another, but in the simplest form of an effective place to begin remedying its stark past of omittance of culture and communities of color from a stake in the development, Philadelphia should prioritize restoration:
“The Commission needs additional resources to respond to the great imperatives of our time: providing affordable housing; identifying, celebrating, and protecting historic sites that are important to communities of color, who are now the city’s majority; and identifying and preserving old buildings, which has a smaller impact on climate change than new construction.” (Steinke, 2021)
Twenty-First Century Transformation
In an attempt to regain fifty years of population loss, former Mayor John Street launched a $300 million-dollar program, the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), intending to clean up the many vacant lots and buildings from the urban renewal of the past, and welcoming up to 16,000 new housing units. The program shared some mild victories, the concurrence is that it was a disastrous failure with even conservative critics agreeing that the program lacked ‘meaningful civic participation. The initiative was the joint effort of The reinvestment fund, a local community development financial institution, and a national leader to form a strategy after analyzing the community housing markets, accordingly:
“According to the plans, blighted “reclamation” neighborhoods warranted large-scale demolition and redevelopment to “create conditions for market rebirth”; “transitional” neighborhoods needed stabilization through quick response to market downturns; and the most affluent neighborhoods should simply “promote and propel the market.” In reclamation neighborhoods, where most of NTI’s money has been spent, policymakers pointed to blocks where vacant lots interspersed with just a few remaining rowhomes represented inefficient land use—a key determinant of blight.”(Vitiello, 2007)
Policymakers, the media, and housing advocates reported criticism after the plans for the city accumulated more debt and completed less than the intended plans within the first four years. Many claims, again, pointed towards the corruption of the City Council members swaying development in their districts and the inability of public agencies to collaborate. Alternatively, the city points to Brewerytown as a model example of their strategic efforts for equitable development, meanwhile, residents of the Community Leadership Institute (CLI), a resident-controlled council see the NTI’s acquisition of occupied homes in West Kensington, Brewerytown, and Mill Creek as takings. Not only did the residents lose their communities, but they also lost their organization’s public funding in the process of advocating. Other residents apart of the African-American Business & Residents Association accuse the city of “destabilizing the community by driving out institutions that build social capital… specifically referring to the taking of the horse stables by black “urban cowboys”– stables that were used to expose young people in the ghetto to amenities typically only experienced by affluent Americans. (Vitiello, 2007) Ultimately the initiative repeated earlier mistakes of wasting public funds and devastating working-class neighborhoods by burdening their most vulnerable citizens with policies that perpetuate poverty with rising property taxes for the poor in disinvested neighborhoods while creating wealth and reviving downtown areas with 10-year tax abatements on new development condos. There is the understanding that a significant tax base is required for a city to operate at a certain quality of life, but that should not come at the expense of displacement, especially with a continuous population decline. To meet the objectives of both city government agencies establishing a real estate revival and satisfactory historic preservation with its residents, especially long-term residents of color, it’s worth examining San Francisco Heritage, one of the leading historic preservation organizations.
Reestablishing Elements
San Francisco measures similarly to Philadelphia in terms of historical assets. The Atlast of ReUrbanism, an arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab, conducted a survey that included examining more than 10 million buildings, scoring the areas by buildings median age, the area's diversity of ages, the building and parcel size. According to the report:
“Areas with only new buildings are less likely to promote entrepreneurial activity, density, and diversity than areas with a mixture of new and old. Places with older, smaller buildings mixed with new development rank high on a score of character, while those with newer, larger buildings of a similar age rank low.” (Kinney, 2016)
They concluded that higher character areas were found to be denser, more diverse, more affordable, and provide more opportunity. Both Philadelphia and San Francisco fall relatively similar in all measures, especially with buildings aging by an era of construction, yet only the latter has seen a population increase not only with new residents but businesses that have migrated to the city. One of the contributing factors is the diverse culture promoted in San Francisco. This is also evident in their historic preservation with social heritage sites like Japantown. In the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) journal, they highlight, “social heritage districts identify resources that pertain to specific social and cultural movements or to groups that have made a contribution to the broad patterns of the city’s history.” (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, 2013). Additionally, Tom Mayes, deputy general counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, shared his personal reflections on the value of old places, which entailed learning, creativity, sacredness, design, history, beauty, identity, memory, continuity, and sustainability. San Francisco credits its historic preservation success to the considerations it makes with both tangible and intangible [elements] that help define the beliefs, customs, and practices of a particular community. “Tangible elements may include a community’s land, buildings, public spaces, or artwork [the traditional domain of historic preservation], while intangible elements may include organizations and institutions, businesses, cultural activities and events, and even people [the unexplored territory].” (Balgooy, M. van, 2014)
Reform
Philadelphia is capable of achieving greater success in historic preservation similarly with a progressive reform and a reinvestment into its diversity efforts. It has already taken a first step in the direction of inclusion with the implementation of a city-wide historic and cultural resources survey that aims to:
“Lead to strategic and equitable designations and documentation to protect resources, Identify means to engage the public, Recommend appropriate staff and resource levels, and Tie together work across City departments” (Department of Planning and Development, 2020)
The William Penn Foundation is supporting the efforts with a $250,00 grant to ensure Philadelphia’s preservation will be community driven. Moreover, the city has more recently begun to incentivize more conversion of historic buildings into housing, however, “the overwhelming majority of redevelopment in the city is still new construction, according to Drexel University economist Kevin Gillen. Paul Steinke, the executive director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia said, it’d be great to see more adaptive reuse for affordable housing since there’s quite a bit for market-rate housing.” (Ionescu, 2022) This is the recurring theme within the industry of planning and historic development, battling either a financial setback or a butting of heads with local government officials. In the ‘Sustaining San Francisco’s Living History: Strategies for Conserving Cultural Heritage Assets, they acknowledge that despite their effectiveness in conserving architectural resources, historic preservation is challenging, not feasible for addressing the root issues of “rent increases, evictions, challenges with leadership succession, and other factors that threaten longtime institutions.” (Balgooy, M. van, 2014) The above discussion demonstrates the recommendations for the current zoning ordinance for historic preservation in Philadelphia.
Recommendation
What has been tried is not working. In fact, the attempts have repeated a cycle of gentrification and displacement. There is a consensus that the city officials are in the way of positive development for the city of preservation, and even with the new coded zoning ordinance with plans for particular objectives on culturally diverse historic preservations, the bureaucratic movement of the City Council interferes with any efficient solutions and have failed to contribute any significant amount of historical designation. The public stalls on W. Fletcher Street unequivocally contributed to the cultural fabric of Philadelphia and had a greater impact on the community. The procedural due process to the non-profit organization Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club was violated. Philadelphia has made great gestures towards protecting the desirable characteristics of the city’s neighborhoods, the identity, culture, and traditions of the city, as well as restoring and conserving the city’s natural and historic resources. It was also declared published in the ordinance that one of the purposes was to “strengthen the economy of the city by enhancing the City’s attractiveness to tourists and by stabilizing and improving property values.” (Philadelphia Historical Preservation Ordinance, 2021) Yet, the city council completely disregarded the stables in Brewerytown before allowing the takings to occur that displaced the black cowboy riders of Philadelphia to find homes for their horses. They relocated to the century-old public stalls on W. Fletcher Street and were illegally raided, and the corrals bulldozed. The idle pastured lot of land essential to the horses was then controversially condemned with being acquired for $1 by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and then sold to the Philadelphia Housing Authority to develop a senior living center that could have been developed anywhere. The city missed the impeccable opportunity to rehabilitate the public stalls, create a tourist attraction, and establish place-making in the Strawberry Mansion community, but most of all due right by long-term generations of black cowboys that shaped the fabric of the Philadelphia community. Worse, the children of that community who looked into the non-profit riding club as a safe haven were also robbed of investment.
My recommendations to the present ordinance introduce three practical objectives to counter the lack of inclusion: (1) an adaptive reuse ordinance for the city of Philadelphia (2) modifying the existing historic preservation ordinance to be more culturally inclusive, and (3) introducing a land bank bill to support preservation and rehabilitation projects.
Adaptive Reuse Ordinance
Currently, there are only five U.S. cities, (Los Angeles, CA, Long Beach, CA, Santa Ana, CA, St. Petersburg, FL, and Phoenix, AZ) that implement a local adaptive reuse policy. An adaptive reuse ordinance would emphasize and incentivize projects that rehabilitated the city's most vulnerable sites. An adaptive reuse ordinance could expedite the administrative process that delays preservation, especially with an understaffed team. Also, a strategic adaptive reuse ordinance could integrate more accessible requirements that make zoning and code more inclusive and flexible to meet compliance that would allow for building reuse. Philadelphia is greatly behind in designation and with much pushback, a reuse ordinance can encourage investment through sensitive changes within communities that have rich historic fabric, yet suffer from long-term disinvestment. Some of the features of the Phoenix program would greatly benefit Philadelphia in a practical approach to organizational structure and procedures. The Phoenix adaptive reuse ordinance stands apart from the other cities because it not only offers development guidance, a reduced timeframe, a simpler streamlined process, and cost saving to customers looking to adapt older buildings for new business uses, it allows any structure permitted after a certain date eligible for reuse without. Moreover, the program features policies and programs: Community and Economic Development, Historic Preservation Zoning Applications, Historic Preservation Grant Applications, Enforcement Efforts, Zoning Adjustment Agendas, and Sustainability Policy. Even further, once a structure is determined for the application, a point of contact is enabled for technical assistance, ensuring that applicants understand which resources apply to their structure, and are available to answer any questions throughout the process. This could be monumental for a city with a majority of low-income dilapidated properties, a growing backlogged historical preservation list of appointments, and a mission to improve its historic preservation initiatives. This is especially helpful to diverse and cultural community members who may be interested in getting their properties designated without the resources to begin. The preservation advocates of Philadelphia could have used this for the Brewerytown or Fletcher street horse corrals or for “an Art Deco movie palace at Nineteenth and Chestnut Streets that the Historical Commission allowed to be demolished based on the financial hardship of the owner.” (Mires, n.d) Any adaptation of a reuse ordinance, coupled with the citywide survey could potentially exacerbate the number of sites that could be transformed into contributable tax base sites.
Land Bank
The city of Philadelphia already has a land bank, however, there are no avenues for utilizing the land bank resources to apply to historic preservation projects. In addition to an adaptive reuse ordinance, a land bank can aid in eliminating the financial barriers to establishing a site as historic. Land banks have the ability to acquire underused or abandoned structures, with a clause and integrated partnership, culturally diverse sites can be leveraged through the land bank and developed for specific communities.
Judicial Review
With much of the criticism around the unsatisfactory preservation efforts involving the political challenges within the city’s governmental agencies, there is also the recommendation for an independent counsel review. As the Brookings Institute stated, “Reforming land use controls is so difficult because they are generated at such a low level of government. Washington didn’t make these rules, and constitutionally, H.U.D. doesn’t have the authority to rewrite them. Most localities like the rules that they have, so there is little chance of regulatory reform from either the top down or the bottom up.” (Glaeser, 2022) A judicial review could benefit the initiative's integrity by adopting policies that are non-bias and thoroughly reviewed. Likewise, this judicial review minimizes the controversy about the allocation of funds as such happened with the Affordable Housing Trust Fund of 2006.
These adoptions and amendments to the current local ordinance allow Philadelphia to actually model the inclusion of culturally diverse sites into their preservation initiatives by helping the residents navigate the inherently complex process of preserving places of heritage. These changes also curb displacement by giving residents the opportunity to be involved in the development process. The current policies now are ambitious yet ostentatious displays of equitable development and make imagining a future for Philadelphia uncertain. The city of Philadelphia is long overdue for actions that broaden and refine its land use policies.
