BIKE: preserving historic structures?

[Patrick Goetz]

Richard Ryan wrote:
> I was referring to what went on at an OWANA meeting, not an ANC 
> meeting.  Laura Morrison has her own agenda as does Jeff Jack.  If I 
> lived in Laura Morrison's house, with their view of the capitol cut off 
> by the Nakona and the proposed develoment at 6th and Lamar, I would have 
> my own agenda too.
>

Yes, I understand completely.  My view of downtown and the capitol is 
severely comporomised by a lot of crappy single family housing in Hyde 
Park.  I plan to agitate to have the entire neighborhood razed to the 
ground, since my ability to see stuff is more important than those 
people's insignificant little concerns.  Wouldn't it be great if 
everyone in Austin could adopt this kind of an attitude?

>  
> Your statement about defining historic structures by European standards 
> is ludicrous.  History is relative.  We are fortunate that the history 
> of Austin is so recent as that affords us the opportunity to preserve 
> those things that have been important to the development of Austin. 
>

I'm sure you know someone who saves old telephone books because there is 
some chance that they'll want to look up what someone's number was back 
in 1978.  These people generally have stuff (broken appliances, 
newspapers from 10 years ago, etc.) piled up everywhere in big dusty 
stacks in a completely non-functional living environment.  If Europeans 
tried to preserve the kinds of things we think are worthy of preserving 
in Austin, the whole continent would look like some junk-collecting 
packrat's house.  Although it is beginning to seem extremely unlikely 
that human civilization is going to last another 100 years, there is 
some chance Austin will eventually be as old as some European cities and 
will look like packrat heaven by then.  Just because Stevie Ray Vaughn 
urinated on the side of some 1950's Clarksville shack one night while 
drunk does not make it worthy of historical preservation, I'm sorry.  We 
need to be considerably more judicious about what is given historical 
designation lest we create a completely unliveable, unviable urban 
environment for ourselves.  The number of historical structures not 
paying market value property taxes is already a burden on the city's 
finances, not to mention that they're taking up space that could be used 
for higher density applications that would pay higher than average taxes 
and provide housing and services in the urban core that might otherwise 
move out to the suburbs.

The compassionate conservatives of Hyde Park have managed to figure out 
a way to get the whole neighborhood declared a historical district. 
This will serve to prevent any kind of higher density development and 
insures that Hyde Park has no chance of ever being burdened by 
affordable housing or similar inconviences (poor people, ordinary blue 
collar working folks, or similar undesirable riff-raff).  The city's 
affordable housing division trashed the Hyde Park neighborhood plan as 
being the absolutely wrong direction for the city to be going in, but to 
no avail.  In this case, the very class conscious NIMBYists got 100%, 
and rest of Austin gets to enjoy footing the bill for their amenities.


> Preserving history and the cultural resources associated with our 
> history is a public right.  That has been decided by the Supreme Court 
> on many occasions.
>

It's a public right to shoot yourself in the head with a nail gun, too. 
  That doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea.


> I'm amazed you would even bring up the term "Urban Renewal".  I thought 
> the "urban renewal" of the 1950's and 60's, often associated with the 
> building of the interstate highway system had proven to be an utter 
> desaster to everyone's satisfaction.  At the core of almost every 
> successful uban revitalization project is historic preservation.
>  

True, this is a good point.  Perhaps the culture clash we're 
experiencing in Austin now is between people like Morrison and Jack who 
still remember those dark times and new urbanists like myself who are 
impatient to get on with the process of recreating a sustainable, 
liveable, human-scale urban environment that lets people live without 
having to spend a couple of hours a day in a metal box on wheels.  It's 
precisely because progress isn't always good that I've recently come 
around to the view that the ANC/OWANA curmudgeons are a useful and 
perhaps necessary part of the process in that they will help to insure 
that every step is thoroughly vetted and can only move forward if it 
stands on it's own merits.  I suspect almost everyone nowadays would 
agree that ripping out huge swaths of urban centers in order to build 
highways through them was a truly bad idea, the full consequences of 
which have yet to be realized.