Hacker News Reader

Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

Where is the actual evidence that strict historical preservation actually matters? The culturally important buildings tend to stay around whether they are "protected" or not...its really only at the margins where they do anything.

And those margins tend to be pretty ridiculous. Seattle, for example, has upheld historical preservation status on buildings that were completely vacant and had no discernible written history whatsoever. Things like old mechanics garages and derelict wooden apartment buildings that had already rotted through.

Strict historical preservation is nothing more than an anti-development attitude codified into law.

View on HN

Let me give you two examples that show different things about preservation review. First, the idea that significant buildings usually survive, anyway, is emphatically not the experience here:

1. http://www.stlmag.com/arts/history/why-is-st-louis-destroyin...

Secondly, preservation review is about more than saving beautiful or historically important buildings. It's also about maintaining an urban form -- about preferencing the existing built environment over modern, car-centric, suburban-style developments. See this example:

2. https://nextstl.com/2015/01/do-the-math-qt/

This second point is tricky, because lots of people prefer the gas station to some old, simple, under-utilized structures.

But not the type of young people who want to work at a startup. Cities need to decide which kind of constituent they want to support.

Wow, gas stations like that in an urban setting really are awful. But then again St. Louis has long sacrificed its neighborhoods for the ill-conceived benefit of automobiles.

I live less than half a mile from the new QuikTrip mentioned above. This part of the city isn't really what I'd call an urban setting. It has a sprawling Sheet Metal Worker's Union building a block wide, a Mack Truck dealership, and a 4-lane-wide street. http://i.imgur.com/QTHKGdu.jpg

OK, probably less objectionable in that context. [EDIT:] The existence of those two many-lane streets you mention probably explains the vacant lots so close to popular St. Louis destinations. Then again, it's kind of a wonder that any public-serving business could survive in the no man's land between I-64 and I-44. Whoever decided that either of those highways, let alone both, should be routed as they are was a demented bastard.

That's right, of course, which is why the more interesting question is how could we let that corner get so bad that the best argument that can be made against a terrible development is that what's there is already terrible

> Where is the actual evidence that strict historical preservation actually matters?

In all the historic places you visit and that, in some parts of the world, add up to a significant amount GDP thanks to tourism or related activities. There are some intangible values as well as they help shape the history and evolve a community around specific places (think West Village, Manhattan for example).

I know it can be frustrating and that sometimes is poorly implemented but historic preservation of places eventually pays off. Maybe not all of the landmarked buildings will pay off, but sure some of them will(not unlike startups in that regard).

And what is not culturally important today might be a century form now, or viceversa. You are applying survivor bias. Think of all the historic places no longer with us because they were not deemed culturally relevant or properly protected in first place.

> In all the historic places you visit and that, in some parts of the world, add up to a significant amount GDP thanks to tourism or related activities.

How did ancient Rome ever survive to the extent that it exists today if they didn't have historical preservation statutes? It has a lot more to do with protecting their buildings from angry invaders than it does with protecting their buildings from developers. In reality, developers have little innate interest in destroying the culturally valuable...it is too expensive.

> And what is not culturally important today might be a century form now, or viceversa. You are applying survivor bias. Think of all the historic places no longer with us because they were not deemed culturally relevant or properly protected in first place.

It is true, I'm applying survivor bias. But you are applying a bias of your own. Think of all the future historic places that won't exist because they never get built. At least with my bias we can reason that the buildings that were torn down were, at one point in time, more of a burden than they were worth. Can you imagine not having Independence Hall today because historic preservation statutes decided to preserve all the historic Chestnut Street homes that were torn down for it?

> It has a lot more to do with protecting their buildings from angry invaders

Well, time changes. We no longer face the threats of the barbarian hordes of northern Europe but we have modern day speculators that will torn down anything for a profit and not think long term.

And again with the culturally valuable. What is valuable today might not be years from now or viceversa, that's why deciding what should be protected usually requires quite a lengthy process.

> Can you imagine not having Independence Hall today because historic preservation statutes decided to preserve all the historic Chestnut Street homes that were torn down for it?

Or having it two blocks up from the current location? But listen, I'm not arguing that everything should be preserved for ever. And I don't know any preservation society that thinks in those terms. What I'm saying is that deciding what gets preserved and what does not is a tough call and a very complex issue.

You asked where's the evidence that historic preservation, as a whole, matters. I'd argue its pretty evident. Yes you are right when you point out that the system can be abused but that doesn't diminish the importance of building preservation initiatives, specially in country that has a short history.

Also, no such thing as survivor bias when applied to hypotheticals, for obvious reasons.

> Well, time changes. We no longer face the threats of the barbarian hordes of northern Europe but we have modern day speculators that will torn down anything for a profit and not think long term.

You don't think those existed in antiquity? Now that is some survivorship bias.

> What I'm saying is that deciding what gets preserved and what does not is a tough call and a very complex issue.

Of course it is. All I'm asking for is to let the decision be made by the people with the skin in the game: the owners. Otherwise you get committees overrun with people who see it as nothing more than a tool to send "fuck you" notices to developers. Without skin in the game, there is nothing stopping them from being abused as an anti-development tool, and to the detriment of our current culture and quality of life.

> How did ancient Rome ever survive to the extent that it exists today

They had a shitload of buildings, and they made them out of stone, and they made many of them to last, and also the city was essentially abandoned for hundreds of years.

> historic preservation of places eventually pays off.

Historic preservation is no more than collecting, done by the government. There's no guarantee that what they collect will appreciate in value. For example, maybe they're preserving 1970's Kenner Star Wars toys, and maybe they're preserving the ones from 1999.

No guarantee, right. Just past experience. But even if there's no big payoff at the end, I'd argue it is important for the identity building process of a community or a nation. If 100 hundred years from now gov't finds out it has a worthless building, they can torn it down then.

Historic building preservation in NYC came about as a direct result of the destruction of the old Penn Station. If you've ever been to NYC via Penn Station you'll realize what a tragedy it was. The torn down station looked much more like Grand Central than a rat maze.

As always, laws are reactionary and laws can be abused for personal gain. But I don't think the idea of historically preserved buildings is fundamentally bad.

In spirit I agree, but can you provide any references? I'd love to be able to make this argument with a source to back me up.

Here's an example I posted on twitter, from Boulder, Colorado:

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_27278888/boulder-...

That seems like a pretty absurd historical designation. It's just creating a burden for the people who bought it. It's a far cry from bulldozing a beautiful old brick building to put in a McDonalds.

Edit:

> The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.

If you go a bit beyond the US, you could look at Europe and... I'm not sure that's true. Rome has a ton of old stuff that's been reasonably well preserved. Berlin has been torn apart and reinvented. Berlin is doing way better than Rome in terms of startups.

Granted, there are a ton of other factors in play, but if it were just about having a lot of historical stuff, Italy would be the startup capital of the world.

I think I get what he's talking about... you want architecture and places that feel 'real', not some homogeneous office park. On the other hand... most of Silicon Valley is very new, and not very exciting, and it did "ok".

>Rome has a ton of old stuff that's been reasonably well preserved. Berlin has been torn apart and reinvented. Berlin is doing way better than Rome in terms of startups.

So what city should we bomb to create the next startup hub?

That was obviously very facetious but there was a quote from the eighties or so when the Japanese were doing so well in manufacturing relative to the rust belt. One of the reasons proffered was that the Japanese had to rebuild their infrastructure from scratch after WWII. The quote was to the effect that the problems of American manufacturing wouldn't be solved by dropping an atomic bomb on Gary, Indiana.

You could throw Munich into the comparison too: it certainly was not spared during WWII, although it didn't have the subsequent cold war problems that Berlin did. It's wealthier than Berlin, but more conservative, and more expensive. Berlin seems to be emerging as one of the startup hubs of Europe.

I think if PG reformulated his point to something involving interesting architecture and places, it might be better. Although... even there, Silicon Valley doesn't/didn't have that at all, and it has prospered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com