 Welcome, everyone, both in person and online. This is the first time that we have a hybrid lecture event. And it's very exciting because the more exciting part of the event is the in-person side of the event, which is the first time that we're doing an in-person event this fall. Some of our other lectures are going to be virtual, as you know, because there are restrictions on bringing out of campus people that are not affiliated with Columbia to campus. But we're very fortunate that one of our lecturers, indeed, one of the leading figures in the field of preservation and sociology and planning is just across Broadway. And so we were able to just extend an invitation to come along. And we are just really pleased to welcome Professor Aaron Pacell to the preservation program. And we're pleased on multiple counts. And by the way, I'm going to take off my mask because I'm six feet away from you. And so are you. So we're going to follow protocol and take the mask off. But it's a pleasure for many reasons to have you here and to welcome you here. First of all, because we're celebrating the publication of this new book, which came out in early January of 21. So that's very exciting. I'll say a little bit more about the book in a second. But secondly, because it allows us to welcome him into our preservation community here at GSAP. And really it's a preservation community that extends to Barnard. And so the real objective here is to introduce Professor Pacell to you so that you know of all the exciting things that are happening across on Broadway and that you go take classes with Professor Pacell as well and begin to meet the students there. So it's a real, it's wonderful to be able to make these connections. And it's important that you as students benefit from them. So that's the ultimate goal over here. Professor Pacell is Associate Director of Urban Studies at Barnard. And there he teaches courses such as Introduction to Urban Studies, Introduction to Urban Sociology, and a senior seminar on the Built Environment. His work is born out of an interest in how social life and urban environments intersect. And what he's interested in, therefore, is these entanglements between materiality and sociality, this space between physical things and our social life. And in fact, it's at that intersection, it's that realm, that realm that sociologists like at Soja call the third realm. But that people like Heidegger called being in the world, Husser called life world, and people that I'm very fond of like Don Winnicott called a third realm, not a world, a third realm in which objects and people kind of constitute each other and help each other make meaning and understand what their life is about. And so it's really core to what we do here. In preservation to really think about not just materiality, but also sociality in their intersection. So Professor Passel's work really touches on the nerve of preservation. And he came to this work from having done a PhD in sociology at NYU with a dissertation entitled Realizing the City, the Rise of New Urbanism and the Built Environment of Social Processes. This work and as Dr. Warp became his first book called Building the New Urbanism, Places, Professions, and Profits in the American Metropolitan Landscape, which came out in 2013. So for those of you that don't know about new urbanism, really, well, you can say more about it, but it was understood within architecture as really policy-driven, but also had a very strong aesthetic about kind of neo-traditional environments, but clustering and making more density in suburban environments and creating more downtown. But it really made a difference because really the people that became advocates of new urbanism became really involved in policy and writing policy. But if you've seen the movie, The Truman Show, The Truman Show, which kind of happens in Disneyland, that's the kind of image of new urbanism. The book in itself accounts for the rise of new urbanism in the United States by placing it in its sociopolitical context and argues that the specific materiality of new urbanist developments reflected, reinforced, and reproduced the movement's action in the social realm. And we'll tell us more about what that action is, that political action and the kind of activist gestures towards what kind of politics, conservative politics or progressive politics. But we are here to talk about his second book, Preserving Neighborhoods, How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shaped Baltimore and Brooklyn, which was published by Columbia University Press. Now what's fascinating about this book is that it challenges this belief that many people have and in fact that oftentimes we hear from real estate developers, that historic preservation is an exclusively an elite project and that when you designate a neighborhood, it is a railroad to gentrification. It's a kind of path determined way to gentrification. And Professor Purcell actually takes this idea and challenges it and has done a tremendous service to the field to show that this is not always the outcome. It can be the outcome but not always. And as an urban sociologist, he has investigated distinct processes of preservation, looking at specific neighborhoods and at specific activist groups in Brooklyn and Baltimore and found different realities revealing how historic preservation can sometimes facilitate resistance to neighborhood change in communities of color and sometimes foster investment in neglected neighborhoods. So the book is the subject of tonight's talk and so without further ado, I ask you to please join me in welcoming Professor Purcell. That was an excellent perspective, I appreciate it. Thank you. First, really before I get going, I want to make sure to thank Professor Otero Pilots. Is that how you say your last name? Okay, I'm close enough. And he reached out months ago to suggest that our programs ought to know more about one another, which for me was long overdue in working in the studies program at Barnard for a number of years with little to no contact with faculty over here. And so it was tremendously appreciated. And I hope actually, the beginning of a beautiful relationship, I think there's a lot. I know that my students in studies at Barnard in certain studies would profit immensely by some exposure to the coursework and faculty over here and the hope that it goes both ways. I also want to say a quick thank you to Stafford Locke, who was very helpful in setting this up and getting it going. And, but also just in part because the book was a lot of work and required a lot of attention, both Eric Schwartz at Columbia University Press and Bill Frye there were immensely helpful believing in the project and helping me see it through. So I'm particularly excited to be talking to this audience in part because previously talking about the research that led to the book, I've really only had the opportunity to talk to social scientists. It means that I have to do a good deal of explaining what historic preservation looks like. It means I have to work through regulation and various practices and such. And sometimes lose the opportunity to really focus on the distinctiveness of the sorts of changes that I'm trying to observe in places that I'm trying to talk about. So I'm excited not to have to explain a number of things to you. But it also means that, but it also means that I'm eager for your insight or correction of my sort of misinterpretation of some of these connections. I have a lot that I almost caught in part because this is my first opportunity to really talk about the book as a whole. And that means that I'm gonna work as hard and fast as I can to go into the material. But it also means that I'm gonna rush past details about method and various sorts of things that are, in fact, critical to the argument. And so I really want to invite you to interrupt me if I'm hitting a point, if I've reached a set of conclusions, if I'm providing detail, it doesn't get my sense because I haven't rounded it, just let me know. And we can work to remedy that. So what I really wanna do in sort of our conversation in my talk tonight, and I hope our conversation too, is what I do in the book. And that's an effort to draw contrasts. So as Professor Otero Carlos already pointed out, there is this really standing presumption in real estate economics and planning scholarship that historic district designation needs to gentrification. And I, speaking as a sociologist, someone who looks for sources constantly in the scholarship. When I first encountered these claims, I encountered these claims as utterly untoundable. Important scholars of preservation, listening to the list of getting involved, perhaps the most cited article that I discovered in the planning scholarship on historic preservation, they toss off a claim like this connection into this placement. Cohen, whose work I use elsewhere, and is really important in thinking seriously about preservation's role in majoring American cities, similarly, tosses off a claim like this without going on to demonstrate it better in their work, without citing the studies that established the sorts of plans they're doing. So the beginning of this project, as much as anything else, was a sort of amazement with the presumption of this connection and the fact that it had been, as far as I could understand, pretty fairly untested. I went down a sort of rabbit hole of trying to think about, there are a number of studies of the relationship of preservation regulation to property prices, and they tend to be rather methodologically difficult, but also ultimately don't really show up. So I began to think about what we need to remedy what I saw as the shortcomings of the presumptions that I discovered, the research that I was encountering. And what I realized as much as anything I wanted to do was to complicate, right? I want to draw contrasts in the book, I want to draw contrasts tonight. So it's to complicate and problematize. Problematize these assumptions, problematize these assumptions. And ultimately, to argue to you that historic preservation, historic district designation, and its relationship to neighborhoods at least, has to be understood as radically contingent. It's specific to place, and more than that, specific to those places history and their relationships to the broader cities and metropolitan regions in which that occurred. So initially, when I initially sort of started talking into the press about the book, I had a much tire sort of argument, and Eric was disappointed when I said, well, now it looks like the argument of the book is it's complicated, right? And that's a lot harder to sell, it's complicated. But that's part of what I want to show you tonight is that it's complicated. One of the things I'm going to do, and you'll have to see what you think about it, is in drawing contrast, I want to perhaps exaggerate some of the differences between two very different places. So much of my sort of work here is emerging from research in Baltimore that's substantially quantitative and research in central Brooklyn, which is substantially qualitative based primarily on interviews and observation. And what I found in the Baltimore case was that preservation activity was substantially top-down. It was mostly driven by the, by CHAP, the commissioner on historical and architectural preservation in the city planning department, and by an advocacy organization of Baltimore Heritage. That preservation really seems to happen mostly at the city level and sort of to trickle down in its effects to neighborhoods. Whereas by contrast in central Brooklyn, it was really a locally driven phenomenon. It tended to neighborhood activists undertaking landmarking efforts in response to the neighborhood conditions that they were encounter. So along with all the other contrasts, I want to draw, I want to ask you to keep in mind this sort of top-down, bottom-up distinction, which I can say more about too. So the key thing I want to do tonight is to really draw out this contrast between what I found in Baltimore and what I find in Brooklyn. If I have time, I will also try to talk to you a little bit about the next steps, the final steps that I have taken in the book, which is to inquire into the things that make these cities so different. To really try to look at the role of vacancy and abandonment in Baltimore, and this radically shrunk city that's lost something on the third of its population since 1950, and then, by contrast, the effects of intensive development, intensive development pressure in central Brooklyn. And so we'll see if we can work our way around to that, but I want to get into Baltimore. So in Baltimore, there are, since 1969, 86 historic districts have been designated. You'll see them on the SNAP, Virginia, and I, particularly well, but some of them are national registered districts, some of them are locally designated, some of them are both. And conveniently for me, the Baltimore Planning Department, up until recently, I should say, they haven't continued to publish data about Baltimore in what they call neighborhood statistical areas. So on this map, everything with the black outline is neighborhood statistical area. So I can do a very simple task, rather complicated task, but technically simple for a relatively technologically unsophisticated person, which is to match historic districts to neighborhood statistical areas. Of the 55 historic districts in Baltimore that are in residential neighborhoods, 73 neighborhood statistical areas are within those 55 historic districts. Then there are 155 neighborhood statistical areas that are not within historic districts. So this gave me the opportunity. The Baltimore Planning Department reports data for 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 about these neighborhoods' statistical areas. It gave me the opportunity to both compare the historic districts to the neighborhood as a neighborhood city, and also to try to think about what demographic conditions were like in neighborhoods prior to and after designation. So the first thing to say, and I want to say a little bit more about the clusters of historic districts, the first thing to say is that historic districts look different, historic districts look different than never designated in Washington City. As Baltimore was its population over the 40 years, 50 years, which I had there, it loses the never designated areas of the city, moves white population in particular at a pretty rapid pace. And the historic districts in the city, which were whiter to begin, moves white population to a substantially slower pace. And it's somewhat of a significant factor, more or less. So the first thing to notice is that historic districts seem to be different from never designated parts of the city. The white population declines more slowly, stabilizes. Also, we see in this side, and I'll tell you just a little bit about the clusters, and just a second, we also see it in this image that historic districts and these four clusters are all historic districts. Historic districts are better educated than the never designated parts of the city. The way we typically measure education is the percentage of the population that has bachelor's degree or greater, that is over 25. And so that's what's measured here. Interestingly, for my purposes, the 55 historic districts for which I had data matched to neighborhoods in specific areas, came in clusters. There were six historic districts designated in the period between 69 and 74. There were eight designated between 80 and 83, 22 between 2001 and 2004, and 17 between 2006 and 2015. And before you ask, I don't know why. One of the things, one of the questions that remain unanswered for me in Baltimore is what determined these sorts of patterns? If you look very carefully at designation dates, it turns out that many of the historic districts were designated in the week between Christmas and New Year's, at least not some number of them. So something about the city council, something about mayoral business at the end of the calendar. I don't know, but this is all of this that serves a little bit of research. But what I want you to notice about this piece is, and I want to get more into the clusters, is the earliest districts that were designated in the legislation made designation possible in 1669. In Baltimore. The earliest districts that were designated are much the highest status of all of the neighborhoods that I have data for in Baltimore. This tallest line is the number of people in these historic districts with bachelor's degrees or greater in 2010. And you can see at roughly 70% of the population, that's radically disproportionate, both the rest of Baltimore and the rest of the United States. The historic districts decline in their relative prestige in relative status to the rest of the city in these clusters as time passes. And perhaps the most interesting thing, and I think we'll get back round to this, the most recent cluster of historic districts designated are much the most like the rest of the city. So whereas earliest districts tended to be higher status places, the most recent, it's now increasing in the case that designation is something that's undertaken in regard to neighborhoods that are much like the rest of the city. Yeah. You said number of designated districts. Is that an average of 69 to 2015, or that's really 2006 to 2015 as well? This is data for 70, 80, 90, 2000, 2010. These are the proportion of people with college degrees living in the neighborhood statistical areas that match with the districts that were designated in 2006. Okay, sorry. So they're all cross-section of the present, but you're just saying break in and out in terms of when the district was designated. Yeah, clustering, clustering the districts according to their original designation and try mostly here to show you, at this stage, we were just trying to show you that in this case, this first later point is 1970. So it's right in the beginning of the period which they designated. They were still higher status neighborhoods, many more educated people than in other parts of the city. And that continues to remain in high status. But so then let me tell you, right, let me say a little bit more. Historic districts look different, but we don't yet know what makes them different, right? Does designation make them different? Well, we don't have data on that yet. And when this data shows us, it is that historic districts are actually, they were pretty different before designation and are actually substantially different from one another and also changing over time. So these are the demographic characteristics prior to the designation. So this is data from 1970 for the cluster of historic districts designated in the 69 to 74 period. As the percent weight, they're obviously over well in the mid-life. And a significant percentage of people with college degrees and median household income doesn't tell us a whole lot because this is $1970, like I'm practicing. So I need to normalize the median household income across these graphs. And then if we start over here, what we see is I divided the characteristics of each of the clusters by the characteristics of never designated areas at the same data point. So what we get here is a sense of relative, right? That the characteristics of the highest status group cluster of historic districts is almost the percentage with college degrees is almost two and a half times as many people had college degrees to never designated parts of this. So what we see here is following the conclusion, following the observation that historic districts are different. We now see that historic districts are also different from one another, that they were different before they designated. And that they are decreasing in different. So this cluster that is designated in the 2006-2015 period, the loosest cluster of the bunch, 100% means that they're almost identical to never designated parts of the city. So again, the clusters start relatively different from never designated parts of the city and become much closer to them. The one other thing I want you to notice about this graph is that the 1980-1983 cluster of income in that cluster was only slightly larger than half the income average never designated parts of the city. So there's something distinct and somewhat interesting about this cluster too. We have extremely high status cluster here and then the cluster of the historic district system in the 1980-1983 period is also different and potentially interesting in the sense that it was a lower income cluster of neighborhoods. And then other things that we can state as well. Okay, so we've got, the idea that historic districts are different. We've got the idea that historic districts are different from one another and that they're changing over time, that they were different before designation. But we don't yet have anything to suggest whether designation does something. In fact, everything I've shown you so far, I think suggests that designation doesn't necessarily do anything to neighborhoods, that these neighborhoods have their particular status characters. So one of the next things I did trying to think about about whether there's a way of distinguishing whether or not designation did things to neighborhoods was to do what I call a matched pairs study. The idea of a matched pairs study came from work by a sociologist named Patrick Sharkey, who's interested in people's life forces in different neighborhoods. And so what he did was to find children in Chicago, one of whose household and demographic characteristics very carefully matched one another. One of them lived in a neighborhood of concentrated disadvantage where primarily people of color hired their own employees, et cetera. The other lived in a relatively privileged neighborhood with a less concentrated degree of disadvantage. And then he tracked those kids over time to see how it was that the neighborhoods they grew up in affected their ultimate life chances, various outcomes. So I was trying to do something similar. I went looking for historic districts and neighborhoods that looked very sad at a particular point in time in the hopes of being able to track them going forward to see if they may seem more diverse. And what I found around 313 was the answer was they diverged. Can, a historic district that was substantially like the one building a little more far and hopefully in 1980 at the time it designated, it was substantially like them in terms of education teams would have matched here, but I matched, but I matched Ken in terms of a percentage and the household income level and designated when the whole apartment really didn't. And this is their trajectory in terms of education and then that's Ken's. So for all of my concern, interest, confusion in sort of trying to draw out the relationship between historic district designation and neighborhoods and try to suggest that frequently what we see is how high prestige neighborhoods designate, so it's not a designation than gentrification relationship. It might be that at least in some occasional cases the designation is doing something. It seems certainly something is doing somewhere here to distinguish Ken from the neighborhood. Similarly, butchersail and the square of the historic district says they didn't interact with the city more very geographically similar across some of the measures for urban city beach field and in the 30 years post-1980 butchersail and the square changed where urban city beach field really didn't change a whole lot. That's just to me, the designation might be doing something in these cases. What exactly I'm not sure is it attracting people with higher degrees of education to the neighborhood? That would seem like the obvious conclusion and then that does seem rather like the gentrification plan that some people make about historic district designation. So what I really want to point out to you about Baltimore is as I said to begin with it's complicated. Historic districts are demographically different than never designated parts of the city. They're demographically different from one another. The earliest cluster is much higher status than the later ones. I, in the case of the earliest cluster and I've seen this in a couple of other cities as well, I like to think of that sort of potential for protecting prestige as a kind of fortification. Sometimes a higher status precedes designation. Other times designation seems to spur a change in status like we see here. So that raises a set of questions about using it as a strategy for directing investment into neighborhoods. And one of the pieces I've sort of left out from interviewing folks involved in Preservation in Baltimore is that there's a historic tax credit that allows people to defer taxes on increases in value of preserved property. So if you can invest this into the money and rehabilitate a historic property and not pay the taxes on increasing value for at least 10 years and it's a transferable tax credit. So you can, you can small scale developers can read your taxes and then sell them to people who will benefit from the tax credit as well. So there's a possibility to use historic designation as a way of channeling, reinvestment channeling funding and redevelopment. But we need to be thoughtful about what it's doing. When we do that, since there are indications at least that it might cause some kind of neighborhood change and in other circumstances it seems not to. So I hope that's sort of unsatisfying. I hope that, I hope that I've sort of I've sort of confused as much as I have enlightened but that sort of the intention really is to complicate things here to problematize the basic assumptions. I wanna shift and before I shift I can say are there two basic questions about Baltimore tackle or we shift onto Central Brooklyn? Not the one. Okay, we come back to it. I'm gonna shift to thinking about Central Brooklyn. So the situation in Central Brooklyn is in some ways substantially less complicated. It's certainly less complicated in terms of the presumption of the connection between district designation, landmark designation in the New York case and gentrification because the neighborhood of the time interested in Central Brooklyn. Prospects, I think it's probably north and to some degree it's kind of simple. Come back in the story at some point and it's these neighborhoods are all gentrifying before they get landmarked. So there's no possibility even really of the landmarking followed by gentrification relationship because gentrification's already well at work. These are the four certain neighborhoods. This is their location in Brooklyn, and there's an important contrast here between one of the important contrasts here between Central Brooklyn and Baltimore is where I really try to emphasize the variation, the diversity of relationships between preservation to be designation and neighborhood change in Baltimore. What I want to emphasize in the Brooklyn case is that there's really a consistency of designation as a response to neighborhood change despite some variation in these neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are similar in their perspectives in particular in protecting the audience correctly but in particular they share late 19th century, early 20th century, around seven townhouses throughout much of these neighborhoods since they're relatively consistent, relatively similar environment across these neighborhoods. And then they are also demographic, historically at least they're demographically relatively similar and she had a various sorts of social networks and connections across these neighborhoods. So why are we in Central Brooklyn? For two reasons. One is that I was eager to find a radical contrast to shrinking and shrunk Baltimore city with a great deal of vacancy and abandonment undertaking preservation for a specific set of reasons. And another is about the realities of research and that comes down to this is where I have connections. I have a good friend who lives in Prospect Heights I mentioned the project to him and he said, oh, I know somebody who works on that. Let me introduce you. So he introduced me to Gil, who introduced me to Suzanne, who introduced me to Morgan and thus unrolled a set of connections and access to various preservation advocates, activists in these three neighborhoods all through each other. And many of them were connected through someone, somebody they encountered in the city bank who works the Historic Districts Council in Manhattan, but it's a resource for people all over New York City and helps facilitate connections among them. So we're here in Central Brooklyn for these reasons. As I've indicated, my method here was interviewing preservation advocates effectively neighborhood by neighborhood, visiting these neighborhoods, walking them and on a couple of occasions getting to observe the deliberations of Community Board 3's ad hoc committee on land-working. Community Board 3 operates in that side and their ad hoc landmark committee is the group that considers proposals to make changes to buildings within Historic District that's in part of that site. So I've got a couple slides that we can spend some time on. Last, so pointing out to you that I'm not going to personally because I spent a lot of time in panheids and cross-strait sites. Our general client, the Firm and Center at Mock New in a 2016 study documented the re-identification in these places a couple of ways, pointing out the ways in which income is increasing more quickly than in other parts of the city, median rents are increasing faster than other parts of the city. And then using pretty conventional sociological markers for gentrification changes in the demographics of the population often meaning an increase in white population and an increase in educational attainment. This again is data from an excellent source of data called the Portrait of N1C, which is run by a green strength center, which gives us information at what they call sub-urban areas about change over time. The data only goes back to 2005 and nevertheless still has to be useful. So we see in these scenarios further evidence of the improvement of whites, the out-of-border displacement of long-term wildlife expense and changes in educational attainment, which I think of as a marker for a class of things, right? In the United States the possession of a college degree is often the difference between access to working class employment and professional employment, at least as part of it. So if you'll agree with me for the moment that Central Brooklyn was vigorously gentrifying in this period, then we can start to think about what emerges from talking to folks. So what I saw in my interviews with preservation activists in these three parts of Central Brooklyn and I really focused on Prospectites, Crown Heights North and Bed-Stuy was a number of things emerged. So one was a sense of threat and response that landmarking in these neighborhoods was often a response to a perceived threat to change the sense that the neighborhood was about to be altered to see the field. Also emerging from these interviews was a sense of aesthetic concerns. As you'll see from a couple of the, so quotes I've got on my slide, much of what's going on is a kind of social preservation effort. Many of these preservation advocates in these neighborhoods are pursuing landmark status in the hopes of maintaining a place, communities that have been there for decades, knowing that landmark districting is not a perfect tool for that end, but turning to it as the only tool available. But I don't want to de-emphasize the fact that these are also people who value the historic nature of the neighborhoods that they're having, recognize in significant detail various historic aspects of the diversity of buildings that they've got, et cetera, et cetera. So these are amateur historic experts also specifically concerned with various sorts of community preservation. One of the things that emerged so particularly for me, and you'll see that I don't want to come back to this later, is that the effort to landmark often functioned as a community building or a group building. It had a community building effect. So when we were taking landmarking, whether the landmarking was accomplished or not, often put in place a community group that could produce other outcomes in addition. The Crown House North Association stands out in particular in that it went on, that organization went on to intervene in the displacement of popps because of increasing commercial rents and works to help people avoid predatory lending in the neighborhood, et cetera, et cetera. So one of the things that I really want to take away from the research in Brooklyn was the sense that the pursuit of landmarking sometimes put in place groups that produce other outcomes. There are just a couple more things I want to note that emerged from the interviews. One was the sense of a local control, the pursuit of a local control of development processes. But then also all the people I talked to recognized the limits of landmarking. The landmarking could do some things, but it couldn't do others. And as I say, they've also, they seem to have a sense that it was the tool available to them. So here are just a few examples from my interviews in Prospect Heights. One of the things that one of the activists I spoke to really emphasized was the issue of stopping visual intrusion in Prospect Heights. Some number of blocks in Prospect Heights are brownstone row houses surrounding what functions as sort of an almost common green space, sometimes cut up by fences, but regardless open to the sky. And the neighborhood, the folks I spoke to in this neighborhood referred to it as the hole in the donut and objected to the fact that two intrusions into the hole. One of the things that was going on in Prospect Heights in the early 1990s was that very small scale developers were buying up these three and a half story towns and knocking out the back wall so that they could build, so they could extend 30 or 30 feet in the backyard so as to be able to then cut the building into four sort of reasonable sized apartments. And that was the threat to which many Prospect Heights were responding, that this intrusion into the hole in the donut. The leader of much of the landmarking effort in Prospect Heights said to me that he believed historic designation inserts an element of democracy to land these decisions. I say, hmm, there, because I'm not sure I think this is democracy necessary. And I think, but I think it's something you'd be thinking seriously. It certainly, as I sort of found later as I kept talking to people, it certainly exposes development decisions to a kind of community or a delegation which might be democracy, I'm gonna talk that through. So in something like, in the first couple of comments we see something like this issue of threat, effort to respond, the ideal of local control. We also see in another interview the commitment to aesthetics, the group building efforts and also the limits and consequences of landmarking. So another activist I talked to explained the house tours that early preservation activists in Prospect Heights had undertaken showing off what the work they had done and finding things in common with other people's experiences, working with these old houses, et cetera, et cetera. And the house tours produced a sense of community but they also became victim to their own success. They exposed these beautiful houses to people who were able to pay more for them on other things and could use perhaps to exceed property prices. So perverse consequence is the limits of landmarking in that case. In Crown Heights North we see again similar sorts of things. I didn't bring my slide, the Elkins House. The Elkins House was caught in the local press, the oldest and saddest house in Brooklyn. It was built in something like 1816 and still in roughly its original condition. And in Crown Heights North and was bought by a developer who was planning to tear it down, build a apartment house in its place. Interestingly, no one wants to defend the aesthetics of the Elkins House. Just it's right to continue to be where it's always been. So local advocates apparently literally stopped the bulldozer with a preservation order hours before demolition is supposed to occur. And this threat to the Elkins House was apparently really galvanized the community. The group, the broader neighborhood of Crown Heights North about which they said if we don't do this this is what can happen, we don't landmark. And Crown Heights North as I think I indicated before is that was the instance in which I found most clearly the sense that pulling together a preservation effort also found that they could undertake other activities to defend and preserve. Lastly, Bed Stuy, we see again the sense of threat and the necessity of response. I think we don't designate developers gonna come here and I can't reproduce the tone with which this interview actually told me this. He said, and developers do not care. They don't contribute to preserving them. He argued. And perhaps notably though, also in Bed Stuy was an interview with a young black architect who was the grandchildren of the people who had bought the Bed Stuy around the stone that he still lived in. And he was adamant that landmarking was not gonna preserve the community as he understood it. And so that he was while he was central to this effort he was also in disagreement with some of the people he was working alongside who imagined that landmarking might contribute to a kind of community preservation effort. I wanna back up and say too that many of the people involved in landmarking in Prospect Heights were relative newcomers, people who lived in the 90s, mostly white. Where Prospect Heights had been predominantly black through at least the 70s and 80s. And so there is some slightly complex recognition upon the part of these activists that they are simultaneously facilitating this landmarking effort and part of the problem they are trying to make. Correct. So there's a complicated bull for many of these activists. So the interviews led me to do something that I don't normally do, which was to try to think about whether I could sort of model the study of relationships. I wanna say that one of the things that made me nervous about preparing this talk was the sense that all of my visuals were gonna be hopelessly and I will touch across the street at the School of Architecture and Learning and Information. So you guys will just have to make do these rather lame visuals. But here's what I wanna suggest and here's what the section is important about but the effort to model for me. What I saw again and again in conversations I had with people in general was this sense that that threat that some kind of threat was really triggered in that. Whether it was the Elkins House in Crown Heights North or what became Atlantic Yards in the Barclay Center at the edge of Prospect Heights or various developers work in Bed-Stuy. Threat of visual intrusion and animation triggered the need to respond. And these responses took a form of landmark districts which helped me a little over a new apparatus. Very good. The people who made decisions about what's acceptable in terms of changes they started probably to say. But the step from threat to response implementing landmark districts had to pass through a root political process. You couldn't accomplish landmarking without first some of you must know how landmarking actually gets done in New York City. But you couldn't accomplish it without building a group that would document the construction of all the contributing buildings in the district and usually provide photos and descriptions and an exhausting process of documenting the historic nature of the structures within the district. And that group building process then also led to a sensible control and addressing various ongoing concerns. This was, they also confronted the limits of the landmark district, right? Landmark district doesn't do anything to press. So various different people I talked to in Prospect Heights referred to the fact that Brownstone next day I don't know at the time a million $2 million, right? The fact that they had protected them from demolition or significant alteration did nothing to prevent people from with more money from buying and did nothing to discourage long-time residents from taking advantage of the fact that there would be lots of money in the district. That's one of the sets of complex relationships in this whole story. So let me tell you just a little bit in the further drawing out the contrast between these two cases about vacancy and abandonment in Baltimore and about the problems of landmarking in a context of intense development pressure in central Brooklyn, and then I'll shut up and ask you a few questions. So a problem that I never really came to, I never really got my head around was the fact that in the historic districts in Baltimore there are higher rates of income. This is, these are my historic district clusters we arranged, these are against the rates in 1980, against the rates in 1990, against the rates in 2010. So you can see a couple of things. One is in general against the rates increase in this period with the exception of the 1980 to 1990 community cluster, which I already pointed to because it was a relatively low income cluster. Interesting to be able to have a lot of high rates of vacancy across these years with the exception of this one which is sort of odd anomaly. But these are high rates of vacancy, particularly in relation to the earlier years to the nevronizing of parts of the city. So in particular in the 1980 to nevronizing of parts of the city here it has substantially lower rates of vacancy than any of the historic clusters, historic cluster still, still here though increasing, still a little lower though increasing and still again increasing, though still few of the clusters. So the first thing I want to say though is I don't know why this is the case. I don't know why historic districts have higher rates of vacancy, but it seems to me that it's not obvious problem for preservation in the sense, in a few senses at least. One is that vacancy is not simply a symptom of decline but it's also a cause and observation. I added a comment by smeared in my first slide. So I'll go back to recognize that he has continued important things as well. So a neighborhoods with higher rates of vacancy are neighborhoods that are harder to maintain simply because there are push factors in terms of encouraging people to leave, discouraging people from moving in. There were a couple of, I tried some statistical techniques to see if I could figure out relationships between vacancy and the historic nature of the neighborhoods and I didn't really find very much. I found a couple of sort of obvious relationships like lower average income one in one day of one predicted higher rates of vacancy later, but this didn't tell me how much this seemed relatively straightforward. So this is also a concern because vacancy leads to abandonment and demolition by the left. So to the degree that historic neighborhoods are protected, Baltimore and the historic districts are protected by their designation. It's difficult to significantly alter the structures in those neighborhoods but if those structures are simply about to fall down, they can be replaced with structures that defy the standards of the historicity. So demolition by neglect is an opportunity for property owners to avoid the constraints of operating and maintaining properties within the historicity and vacancy and abandonment raise the concerns about demolition by neglect at least for me. So that's one piece of all of this. Another piece is that community activists in Baltimore don't know what to do about the vacancy and abandonment they confront in their neighborhoods. They find in the city an unsympathetic partner and in interesting and complicated sort of ways, a kind of informational and positional asymmetry is the way I think of it. The actors within the city government in charge of issues of vacancy and abandonment are thinking about the entire city while these activists are thinking about their own neighborhoods and the experience of the home. And so we've got one who's responsible for thinking about I've lost track of it, something like 120,000 parcels in the city of Baltimore and then another group is really thinking about their own property that probably is nearest to it. So there's this problem of two groups trying to work together who have such a very different experiences and ideas about the city that they're talking about. I'm hard to communicate. And then just the last point I'm gonna make about vacancy and abandonment in Baltimore is about the contemporary room. And that's characterized by an effort called Project Core and I can't record what Core stands for but I can find out for you if you wanna know. Project Core is intended to demolish 4,000 vacant buildings in Baltimore over a few years. 4,000 would change the landscape of Baltimore but estimates of how many vacancies there are in Baltimore range from 16,000 to 40,000 turns out that counting vacancy is really difficult. And so 4,000 would be something but not a vast but not a profound effect necessarily on the number of vacancies in Baltimore. But what's still more interesting about Project Core is that it has discovered something that people have discovered elsewhere which is that it's awfully difficult to demolish vacant buildings because tracing title figuring out who owns the building turns out to be extremely difficult and you can't in most circumstances demolish the building until you've identified and notified. So Project Core set out to demolish 4,000 buildings and has effectively failed to do so. It has at last time I checked demolished something under 160 or 200 buildings. And that means two things in particular. One is that preservation activists in Baltimore are actually pretty cheerful about Project Core. They mostly think of it as ineffectual and a long way from doing any significant damage to the historic touch of the city. The other curiosity about Project Core is as the leaders responsible for Project Core have discovered how difficult it is to actually demolish buildings, they've shifted the funding streams of Project Core to doing things that preservation activists have been calling for decades, various kinds of rehabilitation and stabilization in historic backgrounds. So it's the beginnings of my presentation Baltimore were complicated. The contemporary movement remains complicated in Baltimore as to the various policies that are available. And it's just a last thought about Brooklyn and then I'll leave you with just a couple of conclusions. So the thing that emerged, the thing that emerged from my efforts to dig deeper into the question of what it meant to be trying to do various kinds of preservation, both historic preservation and landmarking and also a kind of social preservation in the context of intense development pressure in Central Brooklyn was a sense of the importance of local politics and really intensively local politics that the efforts to landmark were really about building groups. And these groups were groups of personalities that various interviews in mind pointed out that it was that these efforts were really about who showed. And in fact, one of the guys I talked to showed up in so many different places that he explained that he was giving himself approval in one group to do things in other groups. So this is really about, it's about who shows up anyone interested can get involved but the risk of the areas that anyone interested can get involved and the process really turns on who shows up and who's willing to keep showing up. And sometimes there are complications in our personal lives. Some of these processes broke down. So there were aspects of these projects that failed because of conflicts among personalities. And then there are also the difficulties of relying on volunteer workforce in and around these landmark efforts. One of the reasons that Crown in the South didn't feature probably in my presentation or in my research at Brooklyn is that Crown in the South has not yet landmarked despite the efforts of one advocate in particular to get significant parts of Crown in the South landmarked in part because she's had a sort of personal crisis that has been to her ongoing mission. And she was so much, she was so much the process almost its entirety that with her dropping out of the process as well. So that was a very quick version of Central Brooklyn but I really wanna wind up and I wanna wind up with what I hope as well as the obvious and this. And that is returning to this claim that I'm going to be very early on that the nature of the relationship between preservation and change is rather a continuum. It's about the specific neighborhoods, it's about the people who inhabit it, it's about that neighborhood's history, it's about that neighborhood's relationship other neighborhoods in the city, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is, it's really about the specifics of the particular process. And that means that the way it's a revitalization effort it's a revitalization effort or gentrification and ignition effort, the actors have to be extremely attentive to the specifics of the relationships where they are. The other thing I wanna argue, and I hope this is a sympathetic audience for this argument and I also realize that risks overstating things very slightly is that preservation regulation is the only earned policy intervention left that puts significant local control of the environment in the hands of neighborhood actors. Speaking to people in the preservation bureaucracy in New York City was really where I developed this impression. They agreed, as did frozen welcome, that that preservation was roughly it, that that was where local control happened. And then finally something that I'm gonna be delivering with the sense that local organizations that form or mine preservation roles may also ultimately carry an extra set of efforts. I'm gonna start there and thank you for your attention. You have two other questions. Great talk. We have some Brooklyn experts and natives in the audience. So, I don't know if anybody is involved in regulation, or has been involved. Well, we should. So, I thought it was very, maybe I'll just start and, you know, that's why you're all over a question or your thoughts or comments just to get us kind of warmed up the discussion. But so, you did, you know, the way you presented in your evidence was really convincing, right? We understood that kind of blanket claims that preservation of the subjectification really are just that, they're blanket claims and they don't really hold up scrutiny. Once you started looking at the evidence, it is, as you say, contingent and different in every scenario. And I was curious about the different methodology that you used. You were very, worth writing about that and very deliberate about that. You wanted to study one way in Baltimore, quantitatively and qualitatively, somewhere else. But you could have studied it quantitatively here in New York as well, right? I mean, you had the data and you would have done. So, I was wondering why you made that choice? Why did you want to explore these parameters rather than the same in both places or both quantitative and qualitative in both places? Sure, it's a question you get a lot. So, I've overstated the contracts just slightly in the sense that I did do a real amount of interviewing of preservation leaders in Baltimore. And then I grew on the firm centers wanted to compliment the interview that I had. But to get to the point of the question, I feel very strongly that the data needs to be, the data that I want to use to present my case should be the most compelling data available in relation to cases. And so, I try to be transparent not to claim some sort of perfect comparison, but instead to suggest that what I'm trying to do, there's an idea that emerges occasionally in case studies are doing a most different comparison. And that's almost what I'm trying to do. Trying to take out two cities at some level opposite poles of development trajectories. And then say that simply to use the same both would not serve the best interests of representing the most compelling. So, I've already admitted that part of this was about convenience. There was data available at Baltimore that I could in fact process, and not a GIS user of any specification. Take this as good a GIS user could in some ways to do a better one to study Baltimore. Yeah, what I mentioned. And then, and that also explains the relatively superficial type of data. But I also believe in sort of the, I was about to say truth, which my few students know as they were, but I hate it. Not so much the truth of the data as the particular kinds of data are compelling to catch the case. Other questions, thoughts or actions? Please go ahead. Really curious to know more about your vacancies because I mean, particularly like I've been in New York, but vacancy is often like a landlord problem. And while it gives neighborhood in the poor neighborhoods, you have like the West side and you leave your street that are often significant vacancies as well. And that seems to be like such an external thing for this particular thing in such a like citywide problem and like retail trends and all. I just wondered like, I know you didn't present all of your part in your vacancy. Is there like other vacancies that you think there's now in terms of vacancies? So I'm not sure we're using vacancies in precisely the same way. When I'm talking about vacancy Baltimore, I'm talking about buildings that are unoccupied and no home will be tamed. And in Baltimore, that's substantially product of the fact that the population shrank. The population shrank by 300,000 people from 1950 to 2000. And those people didn't all politely move out of one neighborhood but they moved out from all over the city so there are patches of vacancy. The patches of no one were necessarily housing in some sense all over the city. And please correct me, but I think that you're thinking of sort of making storefronts throughout Manhattan and then also potentially homes that are owned absentee property that are maintained that sound basic as opposed to the one time taking into Baltimore, which are in the process of circumventing time. Does that help? Yeah, I guess a little more in vacancy products, I think. So in fact, it might be that abandonment is better. There needs to be abandonment, it's not precisely the same thing since some vacant properties are occasionally maintained sometimes eventually sold back into being used, et cetera. But it's really a big issue. So these would be that. That was interesting that poor was having trouble demolishing the buildings because of the clean farming movements. But going back at least as far as the 80s, maybe back to the 70s, Baltimore was a sort of poster child for demolishing abandoned row houses. So did you compare vacant lots? I'm wondering if there were fewer vacancies in some of the non-designated areas because so much had already been demolished and there were a lot of vacant lots. I didn't do that. That's a very interesting suggestion. And it seems possible to me. What I did gather through both my own research and actually research that one of my seniors was doing in my CME system, or at the same time when I was working on the book, was that demolition tends to occur and tends to continue to occur in neighborhoods where various real estate interests and government actors believe there is the possibility of redone. And so in neighborhoods where there is less interest in the reuse of the real estate, there's simultaneously less demolition. The one of the maps that I didn't bring is a map of housing market typologies or Baltimore. And the patterns of demolition tend to map onto the neighborhoods in which have been typologized as effectively potentially useful in the near future. So short answer, I don't know. I think that's an interesting suggestion. But what I did find was that the concentration that demolition was concentrated in neighborhoods that various people anticipated being able to develop in the future. Other questions, thoughts, reactions? I just, I'm mindful of the stomach's role, you know, the need to go and have some food. But in terms of materiality, since you did mention the fact that you had no pictures of the buildings themselves and since we love to see those pictures, how does materiality figure in your work? I mean, you put it forth in the book as something important to you. But how, apart from saying that, how does materiality pop up in the research? That's a great question. What I want to start by saying is that the significance of materiality is in the deep background. And it's in the deep background of the sense that one of the things, one of the motivating curiosities of the project was the sense that we urban dwellers live in stuff that is old. I don't know how to tell you this. But so I am particularly emerging from my previous research, which was really about new suburban development, right? Returning, for me, returning to the city and rediscovering a sense that we live amongst old things and the age of those things played an important role in our relationship to them and our relationship to our neighborhoods and relationships to one another. That was much of the motivating curiosity for us. So it is the materiality of these neighborhoods is somewhat peripheral to the directions that the research ultimately took, in the sense that I do think aesthetics are critical in the Brooklyn case in particular, the people I interviewed and the Community Board 3 Landmarks Committee meeting, the details were essential. These activists are really involved in these aesthetics and these historic places. And in the Baltimore case, the materiality of really came in more, honestly, with my own experience in doing the research I made as soon as I came out of time to walk around Baltimore a lot while I was doing work. And it is both, it's a remarkable place. It's in sort of encountering urban spaces. I'm not often scared and Baltimore sometimes left me disconcerted. So honestly, again, for me, the materiality was as much motivation for the project as it does show up in the outcome of the project. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for a great talk. Thank you. Thank you. Currently normal, we will return you to having nibbles in the future, in the body as well as...