Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn

What does historic preservation do? In the most obvious sense, it saves old buildings, returning them to and keeping them in a robust state, similar to when they were first completed and inhabited (although the exact moment being preserved is worth some thought). Preservationists argue, both explicitly and implicitly, that old buildings deserve this kind of treatment, at least some old buildings do, and that preservation is an appropriate use of resources. Preservation also, its critics like to point out, limits how much and how fast the contemporary city can change and develop by limiting what can be demolished or adapted, privileging the “rights” of old buildings over the dynamics of new development. It does all of these things and others too, such as providing employment and affordable housing, in complex combinations depending on its context. Indeed, what preservation does depends substantially on where it is doing it and the particular history and contemporary conditions of that place.

What does historic preservation do to neighborhoods? It might spur a kind of change that leads to the displacement of current residents, what we generally call gentrification. This is what many researchers assume and low-income housing advocates fear: historic designation triggers an increase in property values (precisely why this should happen is neither specified nor clear) that, in turn, leads to increases in rents and property taxes of the kind that force low- and fixed-income residents out of their homes. It might also enable the defense of a successful neighborhood from change, locking in its status relative to others, disincentivizing flight from demographic transition, and guaranteeing that any newcomers understand the local commitment to historicity as it is articulated as a neighborhood priority.

Historic preservation might preserve a community by discouraging speculative development of the kind that drives prices up, thereby maintaining an affordable supply of housing that serves local interests without attracting relatively wealthier newcomers and, perhaps most important, by bringing locals together in the pursuit of designation in a way that confirms their cohesion and redounds to their longer-term benefit. It might also revitalize a neighborhood by directing investment and development into the area through tax incentives, encouraging a “return to the city” among people—particularly White,1 middle-class people—who have insisted on suburbia until relatively recently.

Again, historic preservation can do all of these things to neighborhoods, and other things too, but we have to ask the right questions to get at these issues rather than assume any of these connections. Also, which of these particular processes play out and how they do so is radically contingent on the context of the city within which they are occurring. Accordingly, the inquiry into what historic preservation does more generally and does to neighborhoods in particular must first answer “where?” and “when?” before it can proceed (although it also needs to attend to “for whom?”). Despite the importance of historic preservation as a contemporary urban phenomenon, it has yet to be adequately explored from an urban sociological perspective sensitive to its complex interrelation with other neighborhood processes.

I propose to do that here by examining in substantial detail and from multiple directions the relationship of historic preservation to neighborhood change in two very different cases: Baltimore and central Brooklyn. Baltimore is a city made up primarily of older buildings whose population has shrunk radically since its peak around 1950. In Baltimore, preservation advocates and city officials have long been asking what preservation can do, attempting to use it as a tool for neighborhood stabilization and revitalization, not fearing change but pursuing it. The results of these efforts vary radically from neighborhood to neighborhood, sometimes seeming to offer hope for progressive change and at other times failing to remedy stagnation or consolidating inequality. In central Brooklyn, community activists are trying to mitigate change through preservation, trying to slow it down, but also finding that preservation advocacy can form the basis of a broader community-building effort. The contrast in cases is intended to highlight the wide range of potential relationships between historic designation and neighborhoods. Preservation is not a unitary phenomenon but a radically contingent one, and we must look hard at the mechanisms through which preservation might affect neighborhoods rather than simply fear displacement.

The durability of the historic city compounds the conceptual problem of understanding the urban built environment as a social process,2 and the effort to do so is essential. The contrary treatment of the physical stuff of the city as a passive container for social life denies how the details of the physical city inform, constrain, and enable the collective life lived within it, obscuring the contributions that past political, economic, and cultural processes continue to make to contemporary life through the structures they have left us. The social life of cities is lived in interaction with their physical form. Accordingly, we need to temper the instinctive friction of treating the physical and seemingly static as elements of social process with the knowledge that we confront physical elements from many different moments simultaneously.

The endurance of the historic city, given basic maintenance (which is often too much to presume), is the default. Unless and until someone tears old stuff down, it stands there, serving changing purposes as the city around it changes. There are good reasons to actively preserve the historic city, from the aesthetic concerns most frequently identified with the historic preservation movement to neighborhood-level economic diversity and dynamism as notably described by Jane Jacobs.³ Actively preserving buildings means making a political and cultural commitment to identifying their “original” state, sometimes obscuring socially productive purposes to which they have been put at other times. This is political, too, in the sense that it draws implicit connections among the structure, its architectural merit, and the politics of the moment from which it emerged, usually regressive politics by current standards. It also opens the common question about the connections between and priorities implicit in the decisions to preserve buildings as opposed to dedicating resources to the people who inhabit them—keeping communities in place.

For the most part, in everyday life our relationship with the past (as with the built environment, more generally) goes unexamined. Historic preservation, the process of regulating the historic built environment to save it, is not so much a departure from common practice as it is the articulation or exaggeration of our typical relationship to old buildings, making explicit a commitment to their continued existence in their historic form. This commitment to historic preservation has been institutionalized at various scales and in varying capacities and has grown into a critical tool for intervening in and managing cities.

As a set of regulations—formal constraints on choice and action—historic preservation policy at the local level draws the ire of the “property rights” crowd,4 including some prominent scholarly critics perhaps more properly called the “development rights” crowd.⁵ They believe preservation impinges on property owners’ ability to do what they will with their building, interferes with development, and raises prices in hot housing markets such as New York City. At the same time, the recognition or institutionalization of preservation often does not go far enough for the historically minded, leaving “significant” buildings unprotected and inadequately slowing the march of insensitive new construction. This tension between the champions of the new and the old, along with the difficulty of defining the when of historic preservation and the radical variation among American cities in historic trajectories of construction and redevelopment, makes it difficult to know just what historic preservation is in the contemporary city.

It is easy for me, then, to begin by saying that historic preservation is not one thing. State and local laws vary in what they protect and how they do it, preservation commissions and nongovernmental advocates vary in their orientation and approach, and, most important, American cities are tremendously inconsistent in when they were built up and how much old stuff has survived previous waves of redevelopment (and this, of course, addresses only the U.S. context). It is worth stating that preservation is not one thing because it is often treated as such by its opponents and even by its supporters.

In Boston, Washington, and San Francisco, preservation appears to have enhanced the status of relatively higher-status neighborhoods, producing an effect I think of as “fortification,” a term to which preservation advocates generally react poorly. At the same time, and this is better supported, throughout the Rustbelt, city boosters are drawing on preservation as a tool for urban revitalization—or at least stabilization.6 Again, residents of many cities see designation as a tool for restraining development when it might displace them or, in others, when it is simply displeasing.

If historic preservation is not one thing, it needs to be understood for the things it is, which include being one of the few remaining regulatory mechanisms for affirmatively intervening in the form of the built environment. Whereas land-use zoning generally limits what can be built near what or how elements of the city relate to one another (that is, proscriptive and focused on use rather than form), preservation argues that designated parts of the city should look like this, should take this particular shape, and should incorporate these particular details. Preservation regulations are prescriptive in practice and attentive to style. Furthermore, although institutionalized in city and state bureaucracies, much of the work of preservation—from nominations for designation to monitoring and implementation—is done by neighborhood residents, concerned citizens, and other immediately interested parties. This is the reason preservation works both as a tool of revitalization and potentially as one of exclusion.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster and Kelly L. Kinahan provide us with comparative data about the influence of federal tax credits for historic preservation on shrinking cities that are suggestive of the significance of preservation policy in the current era. I would argue, as I will later in this book, that these data radically underestimate the financial profile of preservation because they do not include local expenditures. In Baltimore, for example, tax incentives have spurred an alleged $1.5 billion in investment.7 It is difficult to guess the value of Baltimore’s expenditures (ten years of foregone tax revenue) on the difference between the original value of historic properties and their value after rehabilitation, but it must be substantial.

	RTC (2000–2010)¹	LIHTC (2000–2010)²	CDBG (2003–2013)³
Baltimore	119.9	19.7	275.2
Cleveland	47.2	31.0	284.6
Philadelphia	104.9	57.9	609.2
Providence	43.7	14.9	67.3
Richmond	152.0	7.5	58.7
St. Louis	183.2	16.1	239.7

2 Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) projects that do not have an allocation amount in the HUD LIHTC database are excluded from the totals listed here. These figures include LIHTC projects in each city’s downtown and its neighborhoods. Source: http://lihtc.huduser.org.

3 Data on Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) investments were only available from 2003. Thus we use the ten-year period, 2003–2013, for comparison. CDBG funds are allocated to the city, thus these figures include CDBG money spent in each city’s downtown and its neighborhoods. Source: https://www.hudexchange.info/grantees/cpd-allocations-awards/.

Ryberg-Webster and Kinahan show that Community Development Block Grants remain the largest stream of federal expenditure on urban development and redevelopment overall, but the Rehabilitation Tax Credit is the next largest, often much greater than the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.8 And, as I note, this understates the public investment in historic preservation because many cities and states have important historic tax credit programs.

More important, however, than the details of preservation regulation is the context of preservation: preservation is not one thing primarily because it manifests differently in different places. Regulations vary from city to city and state to state, but they have in common the recognition of historic “significance” (some combination of design and historic events or populations) and, often, some protections for historic properties.⁹ How these common regulatory commitments play out varies radically according to the age of the city, its demographic composition (and racial history), its redevelopment history, the strength (or weakness) of the real estate market, and who is involved in the preservation process, among other things.

Preservation is not one thing because people put designation to work for very different purposes in cities like Brooklyn and Baltimore. In growing cities with hot markets, historic preservation can moderate the sometimes too rapid pace of redevelopment and can save structures that provide housing at relatively low cost, as well as maintain the distinctive character of neighborhoods and the city as a whole. In shrinking cities or “legacy cities,” historic preservation can save the assets that might make an older city appealing going forward, for example, walkable density at the urban core, aesthetically valuable historic structures, and available residential, commercial, and industrial spaces. Our task, then, is to observe preservation in practice and analyze its impact in contrasting contexts.

Our task is also to problematize an assumption operating in both the scholar/activist and neighborhood-resident communities—that historic designation causes gentrification. This is a plausible assumption that scholarship in planning and real estate economics builds upon and that neighborhood activists, particularly in communities of color, respond to, but it has no consistent basis in empirical fact. There are undoubtedly cases in which designation should be connected to price increases and the displacement of longtime residents. In many other cases, however, so many diverse factors are at work that, without even questioning the overstuffed conception of neighborhood change, we can say that the two are not causally related in any automatic sense.

The National Historic Preservation Act was passed in 1966. This law was championed and framed by the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Trust for Historic Preservation (itself founded in 1949) to provide tools to manage the modernization of cities, in general, and urban renewal, in particular.10 The National Historic Preservation Act established the National Register of Historic Places. Being listed on the National Register protects properties from changes that are funded or initiated by the federal government but does little else beyond the reputational. At the same time, eligibility for listing on the National Register is frequently the standard for protection under state and local ordinances. The federal legislation also enabled state historic preservation organizations (SHPOs) and local preservation commissions to make their own regulations appropriate to their jurisdictions. Historic preservation regulation at every level includes the designation of historic landmarks and of historic districts.

What is a historic district (HD)? The answer is quite complicated. Areas can be designated as historic and thereby preserved through legislation at the federal, state, and local levels, with local designation offering the greatest level of protection from significant alteration and the most significant tax incentives.11

The National Register defines a district in the following way:

A geographically definable area, urban or rural, possessing a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity of sites, buildings, structures, or objects united by past events or aesthetically by plan or physical development. A district may also comprise individual elements separated geographically but linked by association or history.¹²

Federal legislation makes possible tax deductions for the additional maintenance costs associated with income-producing historic properties, but it does not have much relevance for residential properties (the exception being historic rental apartment buildings). The benefits that accrue to residential properties located within historic districts are associated primarily with diverse local ordinances. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation,

This description does not include the range of potential tax incentives that can accompany local designation, mostly deductions against income for maintenance costs, although sometimes only costs over and above what the maintenance of a nonhistoric property would require are covered.

In addition to tax incentives, local ordinances frequently provide strong protections for historic properties. In New York City, for example, once an individual landmark or contributing building within a landmark district has been scheduled for consideration by the citywide Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), it cannot be destroyed or significantly altered without the LPC’s permission.

The designation of a historic landmark or district constitutes governmental recognition of and support for the claim that elements of the built environment of the city should not change because of their “significance.” The meaning of “historical significance” is complex. Historic preservationists’ earliest efforts in the United States saved buildings that were symbols of national history and spaces associated with privilege—Jefferson’s Monticello, for example. Preservation legislation was pursued in response to the loss of a number of such spaces in the face of ongoing urban modernization (most famously New York City’s Pennsylvania Station). Contemporary preservationists conceive of themselves as keeping aspects of our material history intact, up to the scale of neighborhoods, with a sense of significance that derives from the role of the built environment in historical moments of social life. Some also believe we can preserve the “communities” that inhabit these urban spaces; that is, that community is significant and intertwined with place.

Historic preservation organizations in the United States have recently articulated a broader view of significance, one that recognizes the contributions of people of color, the working class, immigrants, slaves, and other marginalized or underrepresented groups in American history (beginning to answer the question “for whom?”). This means that landmark status is being extended to spaces that reflect the experience of those Americans, from ghettos, to tenements, to slave quarters, to the Stonewall Tavern. The Philadelphia preservationist Patrick Hauck told me that people still often think of the preservation movement as emphasizing “places where George Washington slept … whereas it’s really much broader … it’s the idea of looking at what’s going on in … different neighborhoods where their stories are more mundane, but they are still the stories of this city.”14

Preservation’s seemingly enduring elitist reputation, particularly among previously underserved populations, may be changing as urban residents discover the potential of landmarking as a tool for managing development and neighborhood change. Another Philadelphia preservationist, Melissa Jest, herself Black, explained the need for people of color to champion preservation to communities of color, but she also warned that the movement itself, still predominantly White, needed significant education to grasp that many disadvantaged communities were confronting systemic problems that made preservation issues seem comparatively insignificant. She offered the paradoxical example of housing affordability for Blacks in historic neighborhoods:

This shift toward involving communities historically underserved by preservation efforts is as much about the practical realities of urban policy as it is about ideals of historical significance—what Simeon Bankoff calls the “preservation ethic”¹⁶—because preservation regulation often provides a mechanism for local control. But this shift also raises the issue of resources, a topic upon which all of my interviewees agree: There are never enough resources available to support all of the preservation efforts that could be undertaken, thus many organizations focus foremost on capacity building in interested communities and providing technical assistance. This movement is meant to facilitate change, but advocates are not always in a position to implement the changes they would like to see. They must rely on the initiative of neighborhood activists with the time, interest, and resources to pursue designation.

My approach to historic preservation is based in an urban sociology of the built environment. I understand that neighborhoods matter—that they do something, to paraphrase Robert Sampson17—but that intervening in the built environment of the neighborhood constitutes an intervention in complex, interrelated social processes that reverberate in complex and often divergent ways. Many others have approached historic preservation in other ways, and although I am grounded in my specific perspective, I am also speaking to their work across methodological, disciplinary, and temporal divides.

The body of literature that compelled my sociological approach lies somewhere between real estate economics and planning research.¹⁸ This literature attempts, through methods that have become more sophisticated over the decades, to assess the impact on property prices of historic designation. It emerged in the era immediately following the creation of preservation regulations to reassure the real estate industry that preservation would not damage their interests. However, the questions of gentrification and displacement have been evaluated using property prices as a proxy for displacement pressures. This research has produced diverse results, generally implying a positive relationship between designation and price, mostly not in major urban markets, but it is unsatisfying in two primary respects. First, little of it can specify the causal direction of the relationship (designation producing appreciation or vice versa); second, and more important to me, price appreciation is a poor proxy for the complex relationship between the historic built environment and neighborhood social life. Even in the context of price appreciation, we still need to specify the complex mechanisms through which gentrification produces changes in a neighborhood.

Much of the scholarship on preservation is critical of preservation as a practice.19 Many planners seem to presume the designation-gentrification-displacement sequence, but it is legal academics and urban economists who are most detailed in their attacks from two very different perspectives. Most legal scholars who take up normative questions around preservation see it as a social justice issue in historic neighborhoods of color, perceiving the designation process as subverting community control and designation itself as exclusion. Urban economists, in contrast, most notably Edward Glaeser, argue that preservation constrains development and compounds affordability issues in hot markets.

I write in reaction to oversimplifying tendencies in various areas of scholarship on historic preservation, but other streams of thought have been more affirmatively influential. There are rare but rigorous studies showing how preservation can contribute to consolidating change in neighborhoods, often following from gentrification-like processes.²⁰ There is also significant recent scholarship on the role of preservation in revitalizing older cities, legacy cities in particular.²¹ These studies helped inform my questions and confirm my case selection.

In the following chapters, I analyze how preservation efforts have played out in two very different places: Baltimore, Maryland, and central Brooklyn, New York. In chapter 2, I explore the assumed relationship between preservation and gentrification in Baltimore. I examine demographic change over time in Baltimore historic districts using a number of conventional measures of social status: percent White in a segregated and increasingly majority Black city, college education to capture class and cultural capital, and median household income. Decennial, neighborhood-level data from 1970 to 2010, paired with historic districts and their designation dates, enable me to characterize neighborhood trajectories both before and after designation and to compare them with parts of the city that have never been designated. I also have neighborhood-level data on the Baltimore Historic Tax Credit. I use basic comparisons across designation status, cluster comparisons by designation date, correlation analysis across a range of variables, and matched-pair comparisons in which I track the trajectories of neighborhoods that are similar at baseline: some designated historic, some not.

My conclusion is that Baltimore historic districts are demographically different from never-designated parts of the city and become more different over time. In the few districts that were designated before my data begin, it appears that high-status neighborhoods succeeded in locking in their relative status through designation, which suggests that competence in dealing with city government is important here, what I think of as “institutional capital.” In working-class White neighborhoods, historic designation seems to facilitate the in-movement of more educated, higher-paid Whites (displacement is not apparent but would be difficult to observe, given the nature of the data). Historic designation in Baltimore appears to have served distinct purposes in the early period as well as more recently when it incentivizes development through tax credits, although those credits show no predictable pattern of distribution. Finally, across the decades for which I have data, vacancy rates are much higher in historic neighborhoods and often get higher even as the neighborhoods otherwise increase in most status measures.

I complement this quantitative approach to Baltimore neighborhoods with wide-ranging interviews with key players in preservation organizations in Baltimore. This approach enables me to flesh out the overall view of the effects of designation with details and perspectives from the ground.

In chapter 3 , my portrait of central Brooklyn draws on recent research on the housing market, crime rates, and neighborhood change, illustrating contrasts with Baltimore. Baltimore is a prominent example of a legacy city, a former manufacturing center that lost significant population in the latter half of the twentieth century, whereas Brooklyn is a substantial and dynamic city of its own and part of a leading global city, perhaps the most important in the world. Brooklyn’s real estate markets function differently from those in Baltimore, responding to very different kinds of pressures, although they share a history of White flight, redlining, and deindustrialization.

Preservation advocates in Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant report pursuing historic or landmark district designation in response to their perception of rapid gentrification in their neighborhoods. I have interviewed a number of these advocates, observed the ad hoc Landmarks Committee of Community Board 3 (in Bed-Stuy), and coded published oral histories of preservationists who were not available to be interviewed. My interviewees range from multigenerational residents, to people who moved into the neighborhood twenty years ago, to those more recently priced out of Manhattan. All of them are cognizant of the rapidly increasing real estate prices in their neighborhoods, including the arrival of international capital, and they refer to “preserving the community” from a variety of perspectives.

These various sources reveal a consistent account of efforts to mitigate change. I place these efforts in their institutional context, describing the ecosystem of preservation organizations in New York City through interviews with current and former staff at the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Historic Districts Council. Moreover, I examine how organizing around neighborhood preservation issues functions as a community-building exercise.

Recent reports on neighborhood demographics in New York City enable me to confirm the central Brooklyn advocates’ sense of change and threat. Data, primarily from the NYU Furman Center,22 reveal precisely what we refer to as gentrification in central Brooklyn: increasing White population, increasing average educational attainment, increasing household income, and declining housing affordability. Together, however, they do not support the standard view that historic preservation causes gentrification. Here designation clearly follows neighborhood change. Once again, Brooklyn’s experience confirms that historic district designation interacts with a range of neighborhood change processes in ways that are contingent on neighborhood history, demography, geography, and institutional capacity.

In chapter 4, I examine how historic preservation interacts with urban processes distinct to legacy cities. Baltimore’s physical infrastructure, like that of others, was built to accommodate many more people than the city currently supports. The city now confronts extensive vacancy and abandonment and the problem of how to manage it. Large-scale demolition has recently emerged as the answer to myriad negative impacts abandoned buildings have on neighborhoods, but we need to understand how vacancy interacts with designation and other change factors that I have examined in more detail in earlier chapters.

Housing vacancy stands out as one of the primary ways Baltimore’s historic districts differ from other parts of the city. Vacancy is often much higher in historic districts, even relatively successful ones, both before and after designation. I analyze vacancy and its relationship to preservation and change in Baltimore neighborhoods. This analysis is important, first, because of evidence of “demolition by neglect” in historic districts—actively ignored maintenance of vacant buildings leading to their collapse and opening opportunities for redevelopment that never would have been permitted otherwise. Second, Baltimore has recently initiated Project CORE (Creating Opportunities for Renewal and Enterprise), a large-scale, abandoned housing demolition program similar to those in other legacy cities, intended to remove four thousand houses over five years. Much of that housing is in historic neighborhoods, and Project CORE will affect the trajectory of those neighborhoods and the meaning of district designation in Baltimore going forward. I also draw on archival documents to unpack residents’ sense of demolition by neglect.

In chapter 5, I further explore the ways in which organizing around neighborhood preservation issues functions as a community-building exercise, examining the activities of central Brooklyn preservation advocates as they enforce landmark district regulations and struggle to create new districts. I observed the ad hoc landmarks committee of Community Board 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant and interviewed leaders of the Landmarks Committee of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council and Community Board 8 to understand how local volunteers respond to varying efforts to alter historic buildings within landmark districts. I look at who chooses to engage in these enforcement efforts, how they talk about their neighbors and neighborhoods, and how they manage development. Finally, I recount the struggle to create a Crown Heights South district and the process of designating or developing a landmark in the neighborhood, the Bedford Union Armory. These struggles point to the kinds of obstacles advocates still confront in preserving places.

In chapter 6, I return to the findings of my Baltimore and Brooklyn research, putting the role of preservation in each of these cities into contrast with the positions on preservation most common in the literature. I highlight the different purposes to which preservation regulation can be put, different from those for which it was designed, but I also point to the particularity of the city itself and how that shapes the choices neighborhood activists, professional advocates, and city officials make in regard to pursuing preservation. For example, the recent history of rapid neighborhood change in central Brooklyn brings into focus how the work of landmarking there is part of a community-building effort to fight displacement.

Baltimore and central Brooklyn are not precisely opposite ends of a spectrum of urban trajectories, but they do represent radically different urban contexts that reveal differences in how preservation efforts can manifest. The most distinct contrast is obviously between facilitating revitalization in Baltimore and mitigating gentrification in Brooklyn. Given the federal government’s relative withdrawal from urban policy since the 1980s, I argue that the application of preservation regulations and the incentives that come with them in some cities and states are the primary policy tools that provide local actors with any control over the built environment. The questions that emerge from the research encompassed here point to future research in cities elsewhere on the development spectrum, for example, Philadelphia, which has the qualities of both a legacy city and a rapidly growing one. They also raise questions about how urbanists should understand preservation, and I weigh in on this question.