This appendix includes a detailed explanation of my methods. The overarching theme is what I think of as “triangulation:” an effort to complement any kind of data with other kinds of data that will help situate it (whether reinforcing or disconfirming). This approach emerges from my deep sense that cities are too complex to be described using a single method, but many individually insufficient factors may ultimately enable a compelling account.
Research Questions
How does historic district designation affect neighborhoods in cities in the United States? Relatedly, how do historic preservation policies provide tools for managing neighborhood change? For whom? And how do they use them? I focus on historic district designation, sometimes called landmark district designation, because the scale of districts makes them the relevant preservation phenomena for neighborhoods, frequently encompassing significant fractions of neighborhoods or contiguous with organic neighborhood boundaries. It is conceivable that individual landmarks—individual historic buildings—affect the neighborhoods around them, but that effect would be harder to detect. Moreover, district designation rules usually emerge from some kind of collective process and shape the ways many homeowners use their property, locating them in the kind of mutually constituting tangle that indicates the complexity of real urban processes.
District designation, in its various forms, requires some kind of local involvement, and it can be used by urban actors as a tool for accomplishing specific goals. District designation itself is often initiated by residents and usually requires community assent. To the degree that preservation regulations require local input on proposed changes to the built environment, they become a mechanism for local control over change, at least in that respect. To the degree that preservation is incentivized, through tax credits, for example, district designation becomes a way of directing resources to neighborhoods with old buildings. Who takes advantage of which aspects of designation and in what circumstances becomes important for understanding district designation’s effects—designation is not simply a top-down process in relation to neighborhoods, it requires reinforcement from the bottom up.
To address these questions, I have undertaken a number of related investigations. In Baltimore, where district designation is extensive and good demographic data about neighborhoods is available, I began by examining the relationship between district designation and neighborhood change quantitatively. I observe key neighborhood demographics—racial composition, household income, and educational attainment—before and after district designation and compare them with never-designated parts of the city. I also connect these data to the use of historic rehabilitation tax credits in Baltimore and to rates of housing vacancy. Similar, if less fine-grained, data were produced about New York City by NYU’s Furman Center (CoreData.nyc) that allows a basic comparison, or at least a similar observation of trends.
In Baltimore, I have also tried to address the second question—how preservation policy is used. I have done so by talking to leading preservationists, both within and outside city government, all of whom emphasize stabilization and revitalization in this shrinking or “legacy” city context. Preservation in Baltimore is dominated by two organizations, one governmental (Commission on Historic and Architectural Preservation [CHAP]) and one nonprofit (Baltimore Heritage), that owe their existence to the same founder and the same era. They seem to function in friendly, if sometimes critical relation to one another.
My historic tax credit data describes the primary mechanism by which preservation regulation is used to facilitate revitalization in Baltimore. I have tried to capture the perspective of residents pursuing district designation through a review of the Baltimore CHAP designation files, each of which chart the process from its earliest stages through city council’s approval, including numerous struggles over boundaries and etcetera. I have also interviewed residents involved in preservation processes whenever possible.
Because preservation is not a unitary process, I have chosen a kind of “most different” cases approach. In contrast to Baltimore, I have taken up these same questions—giving primacy to the policy and strategy pieces—in central Brooklyn, a gentrifying part of a booming city. An old friend introduced me to a neighborhood preservation advocate in Prospect Heights, one of the primary local residents responsible for the designation of that neighborhood. The rest of my interview sample in New York City has followed his activist network outward to cover the nearby neighborhoods of Crown Heights North and South and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the leadership of their preservation efforts. Neighborhood preservationists in New York seem to rely on one another for strategic support in their relationship with community boards, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and the city council; thus, within a reasonable degree of geographic proximity, they all know each other. These clustered neighborhoods also confront similar conditions, if at different moments, and change within each is related to change in the others. I also included in this sample citywide figures such as the leader of the city’s foremost preservation nonprofit, to whom many of my interviewees had referred. At times I have relied on published interviews or oral histories from leaders with whom I could not schedule interviews. All of this gives me a good window through which to look into how preservation activists in Brooklyn use preservation regulations to manage neighborhood change.
This approach does not make for a perfect comparison because I cannot provide the same kind of data for each city or part of a city in a way that would enable me to examine the same process in two different places. But that is because the same process does not take place in radically different cities (might not, in fact, be the same across any combination of cities). The point for me is to reveal that preservation—district designation in particular—is initiated and plays out differently depending on the specific details of the context of any particular effort. By selecting cases from roughly opposite ends of a spectrum of urban development dynamics and observing how designation operates in these cases, I can demonstrate that there is a wide range of preservation-related activity. If a few commonalities remain between Baltimore and Brooklyn, they are that much more interesting when detected across such radically contrasting contexts.
Baltimore Data
Baltimore, for reasons I do not yet fully understand (numerous educational institutions, long history of urban decline and revitalization efforts, perhaps), provides a remarkable opportunity for just the kind of analysis that my particular set of questions requires. The city has used historic district designation extensively, and historically designated districts of various types constitute a significant proportion of the city’s real estate in many different neighborhoods. Baltimore CHAP has made a great deal of information about the city’s historic districts easily available online, posting maps, descriptions, and dates of designation, broken down by type (national, state, city), and various organizations around the city (the Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute, the Department of Planning, Johns Hopkins University) have cooperated to make data about Baltimore’s neighborhoods available to the public. This makes it easy to secure and analyze information about demographic changes in Baltimore historic districts across their designation and to compare this information with parts of the city that have not been designated. Baltimore provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between historic district designation and neighborhood change in depth, readily admitting that we should recognize the limits of a single city study.
Of seventy-three historic districts (HDs) in Baltimore designated between 1969 and 2015, thirty are predominantly residential neighborhoods significantly coterminous with “neighborhood statistical areas” (NSAs), for which the city provided demographic data from 1980 through 2010. This allowed me to conduct straightforward analyses of change over time before or soon after designation and through the decades that followed. This fortuitous degree of matching is relatively rare in geographic studies and allows a greater confidence in the numbers than would be possible using Census block groups or tracts.
Having downloaded Census data from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, broken down by NSA, and made available either by the Baltimore Department of Planning or by the Government Publications Library at Johns Hopkins University, I reconciled NSAs across the four years and eliminated nonresidential NSAs. Beginning from 267 NSAs in 1980, 312 in 1990, 241 in 2000, and 262 in 2010, I identified the 228 predominantly residential NSAs that were consistent across the period and for which I had data for at least three of the four possible data points. Using maps published by Baltimore’s Planning Department and CHOP, I matched historic districts with the NSAs with which they overlapped.
I took a low-tech approach—matching NSAs and HDs by eye—that was facilitated by the form of these units of analysis. Both HDs and NSAs in Baltimore appear to follow organic neighborhood boundaries and thus frequently share boundaries, although any given HD may include multiple NSAs. I eliminated any HDs that were significantly smaller than the NSA within which they fell or did not match for other reasons. This left me with 59 NSAs that were ever within HDs and 168 NSAs never within an HD.
Across all four census years, the NSA data include total population, white population, Black population, bachelor’s degree or greater for those twenty-five and older (BA-plus), high school degree, median household income, total housing units, and occupancy and vacancy. A few other variables show up in some years but not all. Because questions of gentrification drive the project, I calculated and focused on variables that would indicate status changes in neighborhood population, specifically percent White, percent BA-plus, and median household income. Baltimore is overwhelmingly Black and White, thus the percent White is usually the inverse of percent Black, although by 2010 approximately 5 percent of the population identified in some other racialized category. I also calculated the percent of units vacant in an NSA because of the potential relevance of vacancy for gentrification processes (at least in indicating the neighborhood’s ability to accommodate new residents).
I identified NSAs within HDs by the year in which the district was designated according to the National Register of Historic Places because all of the HDs have this in common. My dated HDs were all designated (with one exception in 1998) in one of three periods: 1969–74, 1980–83, 2001–2004. This raises questions that will require further investigation. I later added data on a loose cluster of HDs designated from 2006 to 2015, but they are much more like the rest of the city.
These tight and distinct clusters encouraged me to examine the neighborhood demographic data. Clustering HD NSAs according to designation date allows me to examine trends in the kinds of neighborhoods that were designated historic in the three different periods and notice the differences among them. The cluster comparison and the trajectories of individual clusters also contributed to my consideration of the designation-gentrification relationship, although no definitive account emerged.
With matched-pair studies in mind (Sharkey’s 2008 study made a big impression), I went further into my data to see if I could pair HD and never-designated NSAs with similar characteristics at baseline, then track their trajectories as another approach to estimating the impact of historic district designation. My three key characteristics (race, education, income) varied nearly independently in Baltimore neighborhoods, so the matching task seemed initially impossible—when I found NSAs that were similar in one way, they were different in another (an important observation in itself). Accordingly, I matched HDs and never-designated neighborhoods according to thresholds for one variable at a time. For example, I matched HD and never-designated NSAs that were greater than 90 percent white or less than 20 percent white in 1980, the top and bottom of the distribution. Similarly, I matched NSAs with more than 20 percent BA-plus in 1980 and NSAs with less than 10 percent BA-plus in 1980. For median household income, I created three tiers: NSAs greater than $20,000, between $10,000 and $20,000, and less than $10,000. The outcome of this set of observations suggests that HD NSAs are different from never-designated areas and that they change differently over time, at least in some respects.
Various aspects of the quantitative data about Baltimore demanded further detail. Why, for example, was designation clustered into these three periods? For that matter, why were a handful of the districts designated in the week between Christmas and the new year? More important, how did preservationists conceive of the preservation project in Baltimore? Why was designation so extensive? Some of these questions resisted resolution, but others could be tackled through interviewing.
One of my Columbia urban studies majors had drawn heavily on the work of a Baltimore-based urbanist who turned out to be on CHAP (appointed citizen). She introduced me to CHAP’s executive director, Eric Holcombe, and to Executive Director Johns Hopkins1 of Baltimore Heritage, the preservation nonprofit founded by architect Bo Kelly in 1960, four years prior to his founding chairmanship of CHAP. They both proved to be willing and welcoming informants beyond any reasonable expectation. Holcombe gave me access to CHAP’s designation files, which helped me understand the process. I conducted multiple interviews with both over the course of a few years, focused on the activities of their organizations and their understanding of preservation in Baltimore more generally. I also forged a relationship with Baltimore Heritage’s director of preservation and outreach, Eli Pousson, sharing public data and discussing preservation-related processes in Baltimore.
CHAP’s local district designation files enabled me to trace the process of and conflicts surrounding designation in Baltimore neighborhoods. I spent multiple days at CHAP’s headquarters in the summer of 2016. I focused on large and prominent historic districts, beginning with the original correspondence initiating the process of designation. The files revealed intentions and motivations, resistance, and resolution, giving a clearer sense of the various reasons designation was pursued.
Brooklyn Data
My Brooklyn interview and observation sample emerged from a happy accident. An old, locally active friend, whose co-op apartment in Prospect Heights I’d long ago helped him move into (wondering at the time why anyone would do so), introduced me to Gib Veconi, then chair of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC), “the leading civic organization providing advocacy for neighborhood-wide issues on behalf of the residents and businesses of Prospect Heights.”2 Veconi led the landmark district designation effort in Prospect Heights, beginning in 2006, in response in major part to the Atlantic Yards project nearby (including the Barclays Center, home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, and 6,430 units of housing, planned). PHNDC’s landmarks committee reviews proposed changes to buildings within the landmark district, makes recommendations to the local community board, and testifies before the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), thus functioning as the local regulator, given the general deference of the citywide agency to local claims.
Veconi connected me to many other central Brooklyn preservation advocates, among them Danae Oratowski, secretary of PHNDC at the time I spoke with her; Suzanne Spellen, columnist and historian for brownstoner.com, a member of the Crown Heights North Association, and one of the leaders of their landmark district designation process; Ethel Tyus, attorney and cofounder of the Crown Heights North Association; and Evelyn Tully Costa, designer, chair of the Crown Heights South Association, and leader of the ongoing district designation effort there. I reinforced my interviews with Spellen and Tyus by securing the New York Preservation Archive Project’s oral history of the founding of the Crown Heights North Association in 2001 by Denise Brown-Puryear and Deborah Young and their involvement in preservation.3
These contacts led me to neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), through realtor and preservation aficionado Morgan Munsey, and to the Community Board 3 (ad hoc) landmarks committee. I observed a number of landmarks committee meetings, in which proposals for changes to buildings within the local landmark district were evaluated for appropriateness. I then interviewed key members of the committee, Reno Dakota and Omar Walker. In the case of Bed-Stuy, I was again able to complement in-person interviews with published interviews of local advocates including Claudette Brady, who contributed to the expansion of the Stuyvesant Heights landmark district and led the designation of the Bedford Corners district.
Everyone I spoke to in Brooklyn told me I had to interview Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, because he knew everyone and was either involved in or consulted about all landmarking efforts in the city. Bankoff described his nonprofit organization’s relationship to New York City’s LPC in similar terms to those Johns Hopkins used about the relationship of Baltimore Heritage to CHAP: “the loyal opposition.” An accidental contact at a conference on preservation in legacy cities put me in touch with her former colleagues at LPC, giving me the opportunity to get a view from inside the workings of that bureaucracy. Another professional contact afforded me a kind of roundtable conversation with a number of employees of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, further helping me understanding the ecology of preservation in New York City.
NYU Furman Center Data
New York University’s Furman Center studies real estate and development in New York City from a policy-relevant, social-scientific angle. They publish position papers on housing issues, such as whether preservation policies constrain development (2014). They also perform an important public service by collecting and publishing substantially descriptive data about the city. On the fiftieth anniversary of the historic preservation enabling legislation in New York City, the law that created the LPC, the Furman Center published “Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in New York City” (2016). It contains extensive data comparing historic districts to the neighborhoods around them, throughout the city, but specifically including the neighborhoods of Brooklyn in which I am interested. Although not quite as fine-grained as my Baltimore data, their Brooklyn data is substantially comparable.
Some readers may resist the methodological diversity of my research. My understanding of what I have accomplished is the compelling and transparent presentation of accurate data, neutrally assembled and reported, that indicate the complexity of the urban phenomena in question. These are true tales of Baltimore and Brooklyn. They are not the only possible findings about the relationship between preservation and neighborhood change in those cities, but the primary intention of my research is to suggest the potential to discern more and different aspects of this relationship. As Robert Sampson notes, when we undertake social scientific research on cities, we often find ourselves driven to portray processes separately that necessarily go together.4 I have acknowledged that problem by taking a kaleidoscopic approach rather than one that artificially isolates features of urban processes from each other.