It's Time to Stop Blaming Historic Preservation For Affordable Housing Woes

Writing in CityLab, Stephanie Meeks asks that critics who claim that historic preservation districts are contributing to a lack of affordable housing in our cities take a step back and find "ways to increase density and affordability in cities that don’t involve destroying the historic fabric of our communities."

Meeks writes that the benefits from our historic neighborhoods are both tangible and intangible. They connect residents to their neighborhoods and to those who came before, creating what Meeks describes as "living history lessons." In addition, many of our older neighborhoods hold opportunities for the adaptive reuse of the existing building stock to create multi-family units. Creating density in older neighborhoods doesn’t always require tearing down existing buildings to build taller.

Economists such as Edward Glaeser have argued that historic districts prevent affordability by limiting tall and dense new development that could fit everyone. But, as the urban planner Jeff Speck points out in Walkable City, 'economists don’t seem to have fully processed one thing the designers know, which is how tremendously dense a city can become at moderate heights.'