From SOHO March-April 2024 Newsletter
Preservation isn’t just a coat of paint or a nostalgic sentiment; it’s the very fabric of our city’s identity. At SOHO, we know firsthand the immense value historic preservation brings to San Diego.
The benefits of preservation are manifold, spanning aesthetics, culture, society, education, and economics. Despite SOHO’s relentless advocacy and educational endeavors, historic preservation is clearly under siege in our city.
Often, the critics are well-intentioned but misguided community activists, who erroneously argue without substance that preservation fuels gentrification and racism and impedes necessary new housing and urban density. Their arguments lack in-depth research to stand against the facts.
Then there are those driven solely by profit margins—the real estate developers and advocates who resent and fiercely oppose any obstacle to their financial ambitions. Cloaked in the guise of public welfare, they spout fallacies about equity, affordability, and competitiveness, all while staying laser-focused on their bottom line.
Another front in this battle comes from those decrying any encroachment on property rights as un-American. Their allies, including anti-regulatory groups and pro-development factions, echo these sentiments without factual foundation.
What unites all of these adversaries is their scant evidence and, at times, deliberate distortion of facts.
Contrastingly, rigorous analyses by professional firms like PlaceEconomics provide irrefutable proof of historic preservation’s benefits. Their exhaustive studies of diverse cities across the nation culminated in 24 reasons why preservation is indispensable.
We urge you to delve into this enlightening report.
Here’s some quotes from the report that highlight a few of the benefits:
Jobs
Historic rehabilitation means jobs —generally well-paid jobs, particularly for those without advanced formal education. Rehabilitation tends to be more labor intensive than new construction, so work restoring historic buildings has a greater job creating impact per dollar spent than new construction. In Savannah, for example, one million dollars spent on the rehabilitation of a Savannah historic building will generate about 1.2 more jobs and $62,000 more in income for Georgia citizens than the same amount spent on new construction. …
Downtown Revitalization
Thirty years ago, the conventional wisdom was that downtowns had been replaced by shopping centers, and if downtowns survived at all it would be exclusively because local government and financial institutions were located there. Of course, that was a prescription for a nine to five, five day a week economic, social, and cultural desert. Thankfully not everyone accepted that premise. In large cities and small towns, the most common and ultimately successful strategy was to identify, protect, reuse, and enhance the historic buildings that differentiated downtown from the mall.
For those places wise and farsighted enough to reinvest and redevelop their historic structures rather than raze them, the payoff is clear. …
Heritage Tourism
Often when “economics” and “historic preservation” appear in the same sentence, the reaction is, “Oh, you must mean heritage tourism.” In fact, tourism is just one economic contributor of historic preservation, but it is an important one. Consistent findings in both the US and internationally indicate that heritage visitors stay
longer, visit more places, and spend more per day than do tourists with no interest in historic resources. …
Thanks for this eloquent piece.
All across America, cities and towns are being saved by groups such as yours – towns that de-industrialization (think factories abandoned in the North for “cheaper” Southern states, Southern states – losing the jobs to NAFTA, etc.), lost their main stretts. All the little stores lost to the Walmarts…
Many formerly charming main streets are coming back to life –
Of course, the other approach is not to lose the historic homes, and downtowns, in the first place!
Tessa, preservation has functioned as a pretext for preventing change entirely, and to further enrich those fortunate enough to already have homes, at the expense of those who would like to. Cities across America have recognized that and are addressing the problem.