 Welcome to GSAP, everyone. Thank you for coming and welcome to this year's Bired Memorial Lecture. I am Jorge Otero-Pilos and I'm Director of the Historic Preservation Program. Care is at the heart of preservation. This ethic of care is one of preservation's most important contributions to all the other disciplines in the built environment. Of course, architecture, planning, real estate, care about the built environment as well. The difference is in the limits that each discipline imposes on itself in its thinking about care. These limits are not just academic, they're also legal. For example, architecture's professional definition of the standard of care is inwardly focused. It's limited to the services provided and to the work done within the property lines of the client's lot. By contrast, care in preservation is outwardly focused and much more expansive. Care for us is not a standard but a generative ethic that begins with acknowledging the world as it is. A world that has been here before we arrived on the scene. A world that has historical depth. A world where old things carry meaning even as they change outward appearance. Few things have changed so much in outward appearance as the land in the sky where we are gathering tonight. This land was forested and populated by the Lenape peoples before it was cleared, carved into plots sold and built up. The sky was only clouds and stars before it was saturated with pollution, airplanes, and carved up into satellite orbit. Despite these changes, the land in the sky that remain still allow me to acknowledge that we are gathered here in the Lenape Hoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. And so I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, their elders, their ancestors, and more importantly, their future generations. And in acknowledging together with our whole school, together with GSAP, that Columbia University was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many indigenous peoples. Now, to acknowledge the land, and I always insist also the sky is to accept their historical existence and the people that shape them over time. To acknowledge is to begin to care. It's to start on the path that goes from recognizing the value and relevance of the past in shaping our understanding of the present towards making sure those things are not destroyed and lost forever. Caring as practice in preservation is a socio-political act of defiance against social, economic, erasures, and exclusions against violence and against ignorance. This is especially relevant for us tonight because we're about to listen to Professor Sara Bronen, a preservationist whose career embodies the highest commitment to caring for the existing world. She's a leader among a generation of preservationists and scholars, including our very own Professor Erika Avrami, with whom she has collaborated and with whom she will be having a discussion after her talk, who together have taught us to acknowledge the existing built environment also as a social environment. There's a new preservation crystallizing around this ethic of care around their work that sees every act of material preservation as a socio-political act. And this new preservation is a challenge to all the professions of the built environment to expand their standards of care beyond their internal professional standards, to draw outside the lines, quite literally, to draw outside the architect's property lines, to draw outside the planner's zoning and red lines, and to draw outside the developer's bottom lines. Professor Bronen is an expert at drawing outside the lines. She, like many of the most exciting and experimental preservationists out there, has never stayed in one lane. She was trained as an architect at UT Austin and as a lawyer at Yale and brings all that formal training to her practice as a preservationist. She's written books and treatises on land and on historic preservation law, on renewable energy, on climate change, on housing, on urban planning, on transportation, on real estate development, and even federalism. Her forthcoming book, The Key to the City, explores how zoning rules rule our lives. She advises the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development Code. She serves on the Board of Latinos and Heritage Conservation and leads the Segregate Connecticut. Previously, she led the award-winning unanimously adopted overhaul of the zoning code and city plan of Hartford, Connecticut, and spearheaded the city's first climate action plan. So no one was surprised when the Biden administration recently nominated her to chair the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Well, who else, of course, we're honored that she has accepted to deliver this year's Bired Memorial Lecture. Professor Bired was much-beloved director of Columbia's Historic Preservation program, and like Professor Bronen, he was an architect and a lawyer who argued fiercely for the importance of old buildings in contemporary life. We're honored to have Rosalie Bired on our call through Zoom or through our live stream tonight, as well as Sam White and Ray Devel, his partners in the office of Platt-Bire Devel White. We're thankful for their support of this lecture over the last 13 years. So without further adieu, please join me in welcoming Professor Sarah Bronen. First, I should thank you all for being here today. I understand it's one of the very first lectures in the post-pandemic era or whatever we are in right now, so thank you so much for being here. Thanks to Dean Wu for the invitation. Thank you to Dr. Odeddo Bailos for that lovely introduction, Professor Rami for taking the time to comment, and all of the supporting staff members who made this lecture possible. And I'm also very honored to know that some of Professor Bayar's friends and family are joining us today virtually. So let me begin with these words. There is, in a sense, no such thing as preservation. Every act of preservation is inescapably an act of renewal by the light of a later time. A set of decisions both about what we think something was and what we want it to be and to say about ourselves today. The value of preservation is only partly in the accuracy and the breadth of its understanding of the past. Its value in the end is the presentation, the old and the new make together about continuity and difference. The value of the combined work increases the richer and brighter the light of its novelty. So those were the words of Paul Bayard, the person after whom this lecture was made. They're in the afterward of his book, The Architecture of Editions, Design and Regulation. And even though they're in the afterward, I think they were central to the book and, indeed, his whole worldview about the primary purpose of preservation. As it turns out, his views in mine are very similar. More on that in a moment. So you've heard a little bit about me and I think I would call myself a preservationist. I think so anyway. I've written books and articles about preservation. I teach a preservation law class. I've been involved at the state and local and national levels. On that front, I will say Latinos and Heritage Conservation is a great organization. If you haven't heard about them, go find them online. I've also rehabbed my Brownstone, 1865 Civil War Brownstone in downtown Hartford. I'm taking it from a rather neglected state. And the only project where I've been architect of record, my desk overlooks the sign of the charter oak in the country's oldest public park, Bushnell Park. So I just say all of that to emphasize that I am a committed preservationist, one who really has been devoted to the protection of historic places. And yet the title of my talk is Can Preservation Law Evolve in its Second Century? And I guess you might be asking whether this is an instance of I love you, you're perfect to now change. And I have to admit, yes, it is. Today, you'll hear me talk about four pairs of concepts, two reasons why I chose this topic, two predominant bodies of historic preservation law, two later innovations in historic preservation law, and two external changes that will force preservation law to evolve whether we preservationists are ready or not. So my first pair of concepts, why chose this topic, I chose this topic for two reasons. First, because preservation law dictates outcomes in the preservation movement. Nearly every aspect of preservation practice is regulated. Nearly every choice that we make as a society about what to preserve and how to preserve it, what not to preserve is enshrined by law, enshrined in law. Nearly every value monetary or otherwise that we can measure in historic places is manipulated by law. So there is no escaping that law is central to historic preservation, its modern practice, and its future evolution. Paul Bayard recognized this, and again, I will quote from him, the public worth of what architecture does is recognized in laws expressing public interests in how buildings function, setting and enforcing standards for safety and similar matters. The public worth of what architecture says is also recognized by law, most importantly by laws expressing public interest in historic preservation. So that's the first reason I wanted to talk about this today. The second reason I wanted to ask this question of you all is because I don't think enough of us are engaged in serious consideration about what historic preservation law does and what it's for. You're actually really lucky you have faculty members here who are leading this conversation not just in your classrooms but nationally. But this room of thinkers is the exception and not the rule. Understanding the nature of the preservation law canon is really important because only with understanding the law can we understand how we should critique it and what we need to do to change it. I should say too, as I will at the end of the talk, that I think we're up against something really important, these two external forces that I'll mention, that are really coming at us from outside the field that will require us to change. And they'll do that again whether we're ready or not. And so my question for preservationists is do we want to yield the field to others because we refuse to lead? So with that question in mind this evening, I want to take you through the arc of preservation law going back to its inception, what I would say is about a century ago. And I do with some care and caution want to critique the troubling inflexibility in our current laws. And what I consider to be a lack of imagination about preservation laws future. So I really hope that this talk compels us to deepen and accelerate the conversations that we need to have about where we're going. So with that, first, to make sure that we're all on the same page, I'm going to condense a century's worth of preservation law into just about 10 minutes. And here I'll discuss that second pair of concepts, outlining two bodies of preservation law that have emerged over the last century. I say a century and I think that's right. There were previous laws passed by Congress to address specific sites. One example of that is an 1893 Congress passed a law that was used to, that was authorized the use of eminent domain and appropriated money for the acquisition of the Gettysburg battlefield, which you see here. That act was challenged in court. It's actually the first case that we have in our preservation law casebook, 1896 case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Actually sanctioned Congress's use of eminent domain recognizing preservation as a public purpose. I will also admit that before 1922, our century marker, Congress passed the first federal preservation law that was not site specific. That law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, allowed presidents to create national monuments motivated by then President Theodore Roosevelt's love of natural play of nature. Presidents use their antiquities powers 42 times before 1922, again, our century marker. The scope of those powers is still being debated today with the most recent legal disputes about President Trump's attempts to shrink monuments created by prior presidents. Putting that act aside, we started to really see preservation law take off, not at the federal level, but at the local level. And it happened starting in the 1930s, just a few years after the rise of local zoning laws. In 1931, Charleston became the first city to adopt historic district regulation followed shortly by New Orleans, and then San Antonio, and soon many more places. Since the steady pace of adopting local historic preservation ordinances has continued, and about one in 10 local governments nationally have adopted historic preservation laws. I actually have been involved in a project where we've counted all of these jurisdictions, which there was no modern count before. So that's a sneak peek number from a paper that will be essentially a census of historic places and trying to figure out why some states, why some places adopt regulations and don't. But that aside, essentially these regulations at the local level were the same as they were 100 years ago. A local body reviews proposals to see whether they're compatible with the existing historic fabric. And this is what Bayard meant about preservation laws governing what architecture says. By and large, these local codes are pretty similar to each other, surprisingly similar. In fact, state enabling acts across all the 50 states that emerged since the 1930s actually after local governments did it first are also very, very similar. That might be because of a 1978 Supreme Court case. Again, we see the Supreme Court weighing in on preservation. It sanctioned a particular local law and actually the New York City landmarks law where we sit here today. 1965, it was passed. Many preservation veterans in this room know about this case, Penn Central Transportation Company versus City of New York, and involved Grand Central Terminal. I won't go too far into the details except to say that it was a very high profile debate about whether local governments could engage in the kind of historic preservation regulations they've been engaged in since the 1930s. It was so high profile that Jackie Kennedy got involved in discussion and many say shaped public opinion about it. By the way, if you don't have this book and you have children or you know children, it's one that I really love. The Supreme Court said the New York City landmarks law was A-OK and you know that because you know it still exists today. And if it was good enough for the Supreme Court, it turned out to be good enough for lots of other local governments around the country. So again, you see while local preservation laws outside of New York are not as detailed as what you have here, the gist of it is the same and you see again this sense of copying from one jurisdiction to another. I should say that the local level there have been a few innovations, Portland's deconstruction ordinance, San Francisco and San Antonio's Legacy Business Program, the smattering of conservation districts in Dallas and other places including village districts in Connecticut. But beyond that, preservationists seem to stick with the status quo and I think we should admit that we've probably lacked some imagination at least at the local level. So now I want to talk about the second wave of preservation laws and that is the group of federal statutes that passed in the 1960s. The most important of these was the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. This law was motivated by the demolition of Penn Station just a few years earlier along with the destruction of urban renewal and a growing interest in protecting historic places on the national scale not just at the local level as had been done in the preceding decades. So with the National Historic Preservation Act, Congress requires federal agencies to consider historic places when they are conducting certain actions known as undertakings. Federal agencies also have to ascertain whether there are historic resources within the areas of potential effects. Four years later, Congress also passed the National Environmental Policy Act which took a similar approach and around the same time, Section 4F of the National Department of Transportation Act of 1966 went farther and actually required federal agencies to provide more substantive protection for historic places when it came to their transportation projects. So in other words, it was that particular law was more than merely procedural. As for these laws, I would have to say that they've been working pretty well. Through process, they have protected many different places including and especially tribal resources and archaeological resources that might have otherwise been destroyed. It's a role that the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation plays is to help assist federal agencies with navigating their Section 106 duties. And I should add here, you know, in light of a pending confirmation that Congress gave the Advisory Council really narrow role in all of these different statutes. So it doesn't encompass local laws or most of what I'm talking about today. So that disclaimer aside, you now know the two big bodies of historic preservation law, local historic district laws which emerged in the 1930s and federal preservation statutes which emerged in the 1960s. And so since these two major bodies of law, is it really true that there has been no innovation whatsoever in historic preservation law? And I would say not maybe not turning to our third pair of concepts. I want to mention a couple of federal statutes that Congress enacted since the 1970s, which changed the game a bit and helped us think about preservation in a different way. So the first is the federal rehabilitation tax credit, which was enacted in roughly the form that we know it today in 1986 with various tweaks and modifications ever since. I see some folks who are saying, yes, I know what that is. Many preservationists work in the field on preservation projects and tax credit projects whether through the regulation side, maybe working with developers or with community groups trying to make them happen. And if you know the federal law, you know that lots of states have copied it and modeled their own state laws after the federal act. So for those who don't know, the way that this tax credit works, somebody wants to rehabilitate a building that's listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They make a proposal to the National Park Service, which oversees applications. And the Park Service decides which projects are eligible for a tax credit. The number one thing that the Park Service uses to evaluate whether a project will receive investment or not is whether the project complies with the secretary's standards on rehabilitation. So hold that thought. We'll talk more about those in a minute. But just to say here, that the standards are very broad. They are pretty short. And sometimes when they're applied, we probably need more clarification. Again, I will talk more about that in a moment and you'll see some images of tax credit projects. But for now, I want to mention a second legal innovation. And that is, again, one that came from Congress. This one came outside of preservation, but has significantly changed preservation practice. And it's the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Here, preservationists had long known because you can see with your own eyes when historic sites are not accessible to people with disabilities. Access to historic places is not just a matter of convenience. It's a moral issue. And one that preservationists who are well trained in finding compatible solutions are well positioned to solve. But rather than finding ways to address accessibility, say, for example, establishing norms in preservation practice or being very active in fundraising specifically for accessibility upgrades, we waited as preservationists. Federal guidance for the ADA today does address public historic places. It allows them to sidestep full compliance if there's no way to achieve physical accessibility without threatening or destroying historic fabric. When the ADA does apply to historic places, it has successfully challenged architects to do better during historic building rehabilitations. Here's an image that we include in our casebook too. It is the addition of an entrance at the historic DC court of appeals. There's a ramp in entrance upgrades and other ADA compliance additions here. And what it gave to people accessing this building was access to justice, perhaps the most important kind of access. The addition is clearly new. It doesn't detract from the old. It enhances it. That's something that by our hopes would have hoped would have happened here. With the ADA, you perhaps surprisingly see the ethic of historic preservation, one of mediating between values being enshrined in law. Just like section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act balances federal agency's actions with the protection of historic properties, the ADA balances the right to access against the desire to keep essential elements of historic places intact. So those are two changes to preservation practice made through law. The first changed incentives for preservation and private attitudes and behavior too, unlocking since its enactment over $100 billion plus of rehabilitation investment. The second affected the design of historic places where the important value of accessibility needed to be addressed. In both situations values were resolved and weighed and resolved in law. These two laws prove that evolution is possible, even if it only happens once a decade, and even in the case of the ADA, if it results in part from preservationists in action. Okay, so so far I've painted a picture for you of a body of law that has developed in a very stable and some might say path dependent manner. So we're now at my final pair of ideas. I want to tell you that I think that there are two sets of external forces that are battering down our door, forces that will compel preservationists and preservation law to change. The first force is a physical one, and that is climate change. Or if you're out there listening and you're in a place that doesn't like to say climate change, you can talk about resilience, the ability to withstand and recover from shocks or really use any other word, it doesn't really matter what you call it. It's happening. We will not be able to save what we value if our laws don't change to protect our places. At a minimum, we have to allow sites to be protected. And we also have to enable people to reduce the environmental impacts of historic places. And here's where the secretary standards come back in. Again, these are federal guidelines for the treatment of historic properties for additions at rehabilitations, changes to exteriors and so on. This is what they look like for the rehabilitation treatment when a four specific treatment types that are covered in the standards. They're just a few sentences. They talk very generally about what people can do with their properties when they're making changes to it. And they may be few, but they're very powerful. They dictate almost anything people can do when they touch historic properties. They're important because they are used to secure historic rehab tax credits. They are incorporated into easements. They have been adopted by state legislatures and local historic district commissions all over the country. And so for that reason, what the standards say and how they are interpreted really has ripple effects at many different levels of preservation practice. So I've published a couple of critiques of the standards and how they are sometimes interpreted to thwart our climate response. They don't expressly address climate change by their terms. They're too short to do that, perhaps. They've been interpreted to deny the installation of energy efficient windows and solar panels. They don't seem to anticipate the need to raise buildings and sites or move them. There are also sustainability guidelines. These are from 2017 from the National Park Service, as well as flood guidelines 2019. They were first drafted at the illustrated version just came out last year. Again, issued by the National Park Service. These are pretty conservative documents in general. They adhere pretty closely to the existing standards. And as you note from this slide, they only address one kind of hazard. They predominantly address the flood hazard, and not all of the many other types of hazards, wildfires, extreme heat and drought that we see happening all over the country. They also, I've said in other places, may not be flexible to address modern challenges more generally. As Professor Avrami has pointed out, historic buildings aren't always the greenest buildings. And so with that in mind, I'll use an example from Hartford, where I live on the energy efficiency front. So this is the Swift factory in 1887, deteriorating gold leaf factory in a predominantly black neighborhood in Hartford. The only feasible way to rehabilitate it was through the federal rehabilitation tax credit, which meant that the secretary standards that I just mentioned would be applied to the renovation. The existing walls in the building were very thin brick walls, just two to four-wides wide without a cavity. When the developer wanted to use insulation, not spray insulation, but removable insulation on the interior walls, they were denied. When they wanted to build precast concrete sills to accommodate a thermal break, that too was denied. The project was built anyway, and you can see here there is no insulation in that space. I bet it's pretty cold there today through the winter. I bet the non-profit developers who invested in this project are putting more money to energy bills than they wish, money that could have gone to community programs. In a paper where I talk about these issues, I also cover the Colt factory in Hartford and their saga with denials of installing energy-efficient windows. I also cover issues at the Hotel Marcel in New Haven, a Marcel Breuer building reimagined by Bruce Becker to be the first net zero hotel in the country. I should say here that I don't blame the State Historic Preservation Office or the National Park Service reviewers. The rules aren't clear. The thumb isn't on the scales of energy efficiency specifically or sustainability in general. And actually, in other ways, our SHPO has been quite progressive. Here's our SHPO speaking at a historic and green conference that I convened just before the pandemic. The SHPO has approved solar panels at the Preservation Connecticut's headquarters, the Preservation Connecticut being the statewide non-profit. The headquarters are the Eli Whitney boarding house, clearly a very historic building. They were also behind a project, I think the first in the country to map coastal historic resources against climate change projections. This is what Mystic may look like in just a couple of decades if average sea level predictions, sea level rise predictions hold. And those are historic sites. They found actually that 32,000 historic sites in Connecticut would be subject to sea level rise would be at risk of being submerged by the sea by 2050. But this work runs against the tide, so to speak, if we don't help by addressing the secretary's standards because there's no way that Mystic can address the issues that it faces without better guidance. So in a chapter I published in Professor Avrami's recent volume called adapting national preservation standards to climate change, I suggest two new treatments, relocation, which would allow for an even promote, manage retreat. The second deconstruction might be added as a treatment as a last resort type of treatment. I also suggest there that existing standards be revised to incorporate both climate adaptation, so in other words, techniques and materials that can help our buildings adapt and respond to changes in our climate, as well as climate mitigation techniques and materials that prevent the harmful effects of climate change. New provisions that expressly support renewable energy across all project types should be considered and adopted. And chemical treatments that protect historic places against smoke and mold risks should be more freely permitted. Installation and energy efficiency should be prioritized and not rejected. In other words, the thumb must be on the scale of changes that support our ability to address climate change. What James Marston Fitch distinguished Columbia affiliate as well called preserving the prototype should no longer be our primary goal. We're also going to have to change the way we approach disaster laws. I would say that preservationists have not inserted themselves into conversations about planning for natural hazards or about how historic materials will be treated in recovery. We haven't been loud enough in pushing for large scale data collection that would show us all the risks of natural hazards with against where our historic places are. I've written another paper about this called Laws Disaster Heritage at Risk and if you're interested in these issues I encourage you to check it out. So in some it's a false idea that preservation and sustainability are incompatible, that we should not fortify rays or move structures because the standards prevent it, that solar panels when roof mounted wind turbines and other removable amenities will destroy our aesthetics. If an inflexible approach to preservation results in the disinvestment in and destruction of historic places we will be blamed and we will deserve it. So I'll conclude that commentary on sustainability by just saying preservation is about change and yet as a world around us changes we have not pushed our laws to respond from within. The second force that will change the way we've been doing things is problematic in a different way and that is the way that a few are undermining the movement as a whole particularly in the realm of public opinion and again I say this from a place of love and as a committed preservationist. So you may have seen if you follow this commentators in the New York Times, the Washington Post and most recently the Atlantic have excoriated preservationists for their inflexibility. One much discussed example was the denial in DC of historic panels on a house. Another example down in lower Manhattan right here where we are today was the use of preservation to delay and shrink affordable housing construction in a massive parking lot. In fact it is the debate with housing where we are losing not only in public relations but morally. We are in a national housing crisis, a structural shortage whose tragic consequences are playing out in community after community all over the country and yet we have seen some instances where historic designation and preservation principles are used to block conversions and additions that are actually complementary to and compatible with historic fabric. So we as a movement have to think bigger and do better and try to help those among us who don't see avenues for compatibility and for three organizations that have done that I wanted to give applause here to my friends in Connecticut preservation Connecticut preservation action in the Connecticut Main Street Center which have all joined a coalition I guess I started somehow called desegregate Connecticut. It was formed in June 2020 originally motivated primarily to advance the equity cause of housing justice. It has expanded to include 80 coalition members of which those three organizations count themselves as well as dozens of team members mostly young people who have been working diligently on the movement on the research advocacy and education sides. Our research diving deeply into zoning codes all around Connecticut includes the zoning atlas which revealed shockingly to me a person who studies zoning that 91 percent of Connecticut was zoned for single family housing while only 2 percent was allowed allows for multifamily housing as of right. Meanwhile 80 percent of our state has one acre minimum lot requirements which essentially forces us to build only sprawl outside of our communities our cities and towns. To their credit our three preservation groups realize that this was actually bad for preservation. Infill development is needed to support small businesses and small town main streets. Conversions can help rehab historic places and housing density is actually historical. Supporting smaller lot sizes minimum parking reform and transit oriented zoning also positions preservationists as pro environment. They help stop us from sprawling outward pushing us to concentrate development where we've already built. So in Connecticut our statewide proposals we were lucky our grassroots organizing model allowed for some statewide zoning changes last year. This year we're going to the legislature for lot size reform and transit oriented community zoning both of which would affect historic places. I do wish that as the zoning discussion statewide is underway here in New York that you have similar voices to that parallel ours. Zoning proposals unfortunately seem to be drawing opposition from preservation groups. This is from an email this morning. So preservationists can lead locally too not just on the statewide level. In Hartford when I was on the planning and zoning commission we made all housing as of right multi-family housing included by setting out clear rules for compatible development in our many historic neighborhoods. We also have guidelines on solar energy that allow for again mostly as of right development. This is actually part of a statewide approach that puts solar panels first puts the thumb on the scales. Our state law says historic commissions can't deny applications for solar unless there are serious consequences to historic fabric. So as preservationists I do think we need to start taking from within a pro housing stance. I think we need to take a pro climate response stance and we need to actively and on a national scale support solutions not just show up at meetings and throw up roadblocks. I have to believe that there are more people who support this kind of evolution within our movement than do not. So I will just repeat here that preservation is really about change and as the world around us changes we need to push our laws to respond. So just to conclude this is a scholarly talk for scholarly audiences and I should just reiterate that I haven't said anything here that I haven't said before or written about before. I did think about showing you what you might have seen in prior by our lectures stunning projects and glossy images which inspired me certainly as I watched them on your YouTube channel. But I think what you most needed to hear today is that unless each one of us in this room each one of us watching lawyers and non-lawyers deepen our understanding about what preservation law is how it impacts the places we care about unless we get into the weeds and the words preservation as we know it will become increasingly untenable and out of touch as a field. It really is better for us as preservationists to lead in mediating between old aspirations and new realities between under protection on the one hand and over protection on the other between our clinging to accuracy and our need to allow for difference richness and brightness between our passion for the prototype and our urgent need to protect what we can while we still can. It is really better for us as preservationists to assess our values and to renew our movement to welcome new people to it and to let them shape our direction. So I will leave you again with the words of Bayar. There is in a sense no such thing as preservation. Every act of preservation is inescapably an act of renewal by the light of a later time a set of decisions both about what we think something was and what we want it to be and to say about ourselves today. So thanks again for letting me speak with you. Thanks for inviting me here today and I hope to see you again by the light of a later time. So thank you so much for thought-provoking talk but I think an affirming one for many of us in the field who are not willing to yield. I stand in solidarity with you on that as you know and as most of my students know for sure as well as my colleagues and so I appreciate you the role of law and in particular I was struck by your comment that that value is manipulated by law that in setting up these policy structures and the institutions that support them we establish norms standards like the Secretary of Interior standards that fundamentally frame and in some ways curtail our ability to be future thinking and forward-looking. So I'd like to really dive into your different areas a little bit and the first one really thinking about that dialectic between the local and the federal by establishing those norms like the Secretary of Interior standards by setting up things like the certified local governments where the federal government provides funding to local governments who frame their ordinances in compliance with things like the criteria for the national register as well as the standards. So the copying that you referred to between municipalities is also reinforced between the federal and the local and I'm wondering whether you'd comment on that and talk a little bit about how you see disrupting that you know that field of reinforcement whether it's lateral or between levels of government. Yeah so for those not familiar with Professor Avrami's work she's actually gone out and documented all of the local governments and to what extent their codes are homogeneous so I certainly rely on her research to make these claims in the talk and my own work about how there is a lot of copying between jurisdictions. As she says this is institutionalized it is something that's reinforced by the federal standards certified local government compliance being one way that that happens so a lot of times what happens is at the local level there is simply an overall reference to let's say the secretary standards so if the secretary standards change that reference would then refer to updated standards so in that sense if it's a very minimal reference in local laws that's a good thing because it would allow for changes to be then trickled back down to the local level as if and as changes happen with the standards. Other times they take the standards and they take them word for word and then put them in into local laws and that obviously presents more of a challenge in terms of updating. The ideal thing would be that first part of the certification program becomes institutionalized and if the secretary standards change at a certain point within two three five years the local governments laws would have to be updated if they were to the contrary if they were the second kind of laws so I think there is a way to institutionalize the updates it's not something that it would be something that the National Park Service if they ever did update the secretary standards would have to think about and think carefully about because local governments have so many different ways of doing things. So let's talk about significance and integrity because so much of why we designate something gets tied to that idea of material integrity and that significance can't necessarily be divorced from the formal dimensions of places. And so how do we how do we reconsider the ways in which those fundamental criteria again which underpin the National Register and oftentimes get repeated in in local ordinances how do we reconsider them in a way that allows the kinds of change that may be required in the face of the climate crisis to be understood as you know acceptable without kind of damaging the material integrity because that's the argument we usually hear there's so much against the material integrity. Yes I mean so Professor Abrami is referring to standards for the National Register of Historic Places which are very similar at the state and local levels and they typically revolve around two concepts is the site significant does it have a significant event or person associated with it is it a significant architectural style or is it is it important to prehistory or history those are typically the four paths to significance paired with that is this question of integrity so before resources listed it has to be shown to have integrity which is the ability its ability to communicate its own significance I didn't talk about the National Register standards in my talk but they're hugely important in the three federal statutes that I mentioned all of which tie their protections to only properties on or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and they're hugely important for state and local designations as well and so your question about how do we how do we change them how should we change them I mean the standards have been challenged the standards for designation the National Register Standards have been challenged not just on elitist grounds but also on the grounds of exclusion and discussion about how underrepresented communities may not be able to satisfy through their cherished sites the kinds of material standards that sometimes are read into the National Register criteria I mean there's not an easy answer to this one maybe that's why I avoided it in my talk but but I mean but but in reality there are a lot of different models as to how other countries look at the designation process so looking at different different levels of designation something we haven't really considered here in this country which may allow for different standards to be applied in different situations and there's also a discussion happening about how tribal resources may need a different type of standard but especially those that rely on traditional knowledge for proof of significance proof that cannot be provided unnecessarily to the American government in the form that it is frequently sought because of current National Register criteria so I think that's an ongoing discussion I think for me that the clear the clear set of solutions emerges when you think about the standards secretary of standards for the treatment of historic properties it's a little less clear about what is the best approach to the National Register criteria now on the advisory council that's completely you know there's no there's no authority over any of those things so any anything that I would say here or you know even in that rule would just be you know just that advisory but I think that if you put enough preservationists in a room you know hopefully they can come together with the solution and that's what I hope to see so I'm going to push them a little further and talk about energy and which is a fascinating instance whereby law really did impose upon preservationists the need for change right and as I know that you know there were several legal challenges by preservation organizations to the law and having to comply with the law and so it is an instance where we can look back and say well we may not have been on the side of justice on that one right we were not thinking about questions of access and questions of exclusion and because we were so concerned with material forms and so it presents a really interesting case whereby you know the law resolved it for us whether we liked it or not and now we've moved toward a practice instead of policies that more readily embraces the need to make these kinds of changes to start properties so I'm curious when it comes to questions of energy and that can be from installing solar panels onto historic properties or the fact that across the United States at least at the state level historic buildings are exempted from energy code compliance and so we have long histories of not having to retrofit buildings for energy code compliance so do you see the law stepping in and compelling change on that one or do you see a way in which the institutional infrastructure of preservation can mobilize change itself so the the kinds of laws that impact how much energy buildings use and how much energy we use to create them are you really find that those levers of power in building codes and maybe even housing codes which have maintenance requirements you know the the truth is that preservationists don't seem to be all that involved in the process of developing those codes they're typically developed through the international code council which has a suite of dozens of different kinds of codes including an existing buildings code and separate energy code and all kinds of other of course standard building code and all kinds of other specialty subcodes I don't know that preservationists are very involved in that and I think as you I think your your research suggests they probably would most want or advocate for exemptions to these codes I think it's really important for us as preservationists to not to almost like the the ADA which has which in its application it really widely varies but where historic buildings are exempt from many ADA compliance requirements you know sometimes you ask why and that's a similar question I think you can ask on the energy code side why are all historic buildings exempt of course it's more costly it adds to renovation costs but over the course of time many of those costs can be recouped by the building owners or the building users so in in many cases the upfront investments in in energy materials techniques or arrangements that result in more efficient buildings pay off over time so I mean I guess my hope is that we come to some growing consensus within our community that it's time for us to be subjected to some of those things and and make it a balance of course but that something that I think we're not engaged in right now much unless you've seen more than I have we're working on it right so with that idea of investment oftentimes we as preservationists think about investment on a building by building basis right even we apply for the tax credits you know based on a project and I know that the work that you've done through desegregate Connecticut is thinking at a much larger scale right thinking about this not only as larger geographies but as you know more diverse publics right and what does that mean when we think about reinvestment in a community revitalization and community that gets beyond the building and so I'd like you to talk a little bit about that notion how tax credits might play a role in that or might be considered differently because right now the way in which as you you know so aptly illustrated that process of review going through the Shippo and the National Park Service they are mandated to only think about the form right they're mandated to only think about what's happening to the building what gets preserved its integrity its significance they have no mandate to think about impacts on population they have no mandate to consider less energy consumption and or economic vitality for example and so how might you see those kinds of processes whether it's tax credits or other policy tools enabling preservation is to kind of move beyond the governance model that so focuses on the building you know that's a really interesting question and when you were talking about the the individual building approach of the tax credits it may be think well why can't communities go in with the whole streetscape approach or a community amenity but neighborhood approach and really ask for investments on all of it you know maybe that's a new innovation that should be considered and added to how we think about the tax credit program nationally the national main street center has been involved in lots of projects that have added up individual buildings for tax credit projects on a main street or in a community and they've kind of done the individual by individual model to add up to more than a whole but that doesn't address really your your questions about the community benefits that preservation projects might provide and and how you measure those and and I guess I would say right now I don't know that we have good tools to measure the kinds of impacts that even an individual project might have or the ripple effects of a preservation project whether it might lead to gentrification or exclusion whether an individual project might have long-term negative effects on the community or or many long-term positive effects it's hard to know we do right now only have the tools to measure what we put into a building and how many jobs are created in that building construction jobs and jobs in the building residents residences that are created so it would be a different way of thinking about the benefits of preservation one that you know even scholars who have looked at the economic benefits of preservation there have been studies about that but I don't know that they've been thought about in a tax credit context so that's interesting too. I'd like you to talk a little bit more because you were very effective at building a coalition that expanded well beyond preservationists but also bringing preservationists into that mix the preservation organizations in Connecticut who as you noted sort of bought into the idea of densifying right and density and preservation are not always happy bedfellas as we know so could you talk a little bit about how mutual trust mutual respect was built amongst the varying coalition members how preservation kind of saw itself in relationship to this broader raft of of agencies not for profits etc and how you see that as a potential model for similar types of coalition building in other contexts. Yeah I mean I guess I would say that everybody has an interest in creating more housing opportunities for everybody because it benefits all of us when all of us can have access to homes and so I think if you buy into that simple concept it's and if you just keep saying those same words over and over again it's kind of hard to develop good arguments against that so I think one way to start attracting people to coalitions like ours and other states is just to say this benefits all of us this benefits environmentalists it benefits preservationists it benefits developers it benefits people families who cannot find housing now who are doubled up who are paying too much of their income who can't afford the things that they they can afford I think if you look at our coalition it's actually started off with professional groups the American Association of Architects Connecticut chapter the American Planning Association Connecticut chapter the affordable housing groups as well we have several statewide and local groups social justice organizations and environmental groups and what we tried to do was build consensus on a series of reforms that would meet intersectional goals so we're not saying free for all housing everywhere and all we're doing is just allowing we all we want you know we're not advocating for just again free for all permitting everywhere our suggestions are very tailored to where existing development exists to where existing infrastructure exists to build on what we have already created and that should have appeal to lots of different groups and preservationists again fortunately saw that as appealing now again we're in terms of our current proposals we're not saying everywhere in Connecticut should be full of Manhattan style skyscrapers despite what opponents sometimes suggest our proposals are are promoting we are suggesting you know middle density within towns at places where there is existing sewer and water infrastructure allowing for eight units per acre which in New York is like a luxury beyond luxury right I mean eight units per acres but in Connecticut it's sort of baby steps and I think that's where you you you actually maybe this is the way that you know law professor's mind works is that you start with what the words on the page are you start with what the policy is and if you can get enough people to agree on the policies that you're promoting then they will continue to build and we've been really fortunate with our movement that has only continued to grow we recently actually there are two and latest members of the Connecticut Citizens Climate Lobby and the Greater New Haven Arts Council because it's not our artists need housing too where are they going to find housing we're in this with you and actually we're going to help jazz up your materials a bit so there's a there's a win-win there so I think it's just the the trust building is we're going to develop a policy together we're going to go in together and it's going to we're going to make sure that it meets everybody's goals and we'll make incremental progress we're not going to turn Connecticut into Manhattan but we need to start thinking differently about where we're placing housing which again the central premise of what we're talking about is that everybody needs this even if you're you know for everybody from somebody who's searching for housing to somebody who has a magnificent house somewhere in somewhere in Connecticut we all benefit before I open up I want to pose one more to you since our audience is largely comprised of students preservation students law students others as you think about the future of the field as you think about what's needed to not yield the field what do you see as being important for future generations of preservationists to be thinking about so I think that you should as future preservationists you should show up to meetings with existing preservationists because you are not in those rooms I can guarantee it you are not you are not in those rooms I mean maybe you maybe you guys probably attend some of these but you should be in all of the rooms ask nonprofit organizations who are advocating for preservation whether you can go to their meetings whether you can sign up for a committee whether you can write something in the newsletter if you don't break into the rooms where you're not already invited explicitly the preservation movement will be slower to change one of the reasons that I showed you the slide of our team for desegregate Connecticut was because you could probably see that I was probably the oldest person on the slide and that it was largely young people right now in our team we have young people from universities they're from Connecticut but they they're going to Harvard and Michigan and Yale and School of Architecture and UConn and Eastern Connecticut State University and high schools in Connecticut and and and and so our team is really driven by and powered by young people and the reason that's important is because if you look at the composition of zoning commissions around Connecticut around the country they are not young people and by encouraging that army of young people to get engaged in zoning like who thinks about zoning but they're all there chatting about zoning in fact they're meeting tonight our team meeting is tonight um they're right now chatting about the best strategies to do this and that um in the state and they're strategizing they're leading and they all came to us just by contacting us and we said okay we'll we'll have something for you to do no problem and um that's how open I think the preservation existing preservationists should be to you and if they're not then you know you should try to try to get involved wherever you can because they need you we need you preservationists need you on the land you side if you're on the zoning side zoning commissions need you and slowly we can build up the change that's needed to rethink the way that we do things and I don't again I never ascribe bad motives to people um and and the status quo the status quo is the status quo laws are hard to change it's a hassle you have to notice them you have to draft them you have to it's like a big hassle to change laws so they just kind of sit around there and I don't think it's again maybe not malicious it's just we haven't thought about them and so your job as young people is to go out and make room for yourself in this field and to help people think about what we can all do to try to make things better thank you um questions I think in light of your discussion about housing shortage as being a crisis and and sort of that middle density as being a goal of sorts um it's sort of paradoxical with historic preservation sort of being like do you keep some neighborhood that's already sort of inefficient in that metric I'm curious to know like your take on how what shape that will take in the future and maybe as an example like certain districts that might be sort of inherently inefficient um trying to throw that word in there in that context so are you asking um are you asking about uh why choose middle density as a goal or or given that um I I'm an architecture student so I'm interested in sort of the the formal aspects of of that sort of future and um if you could say something about what you see going forward I mean if if you know you the first part of your question was if there is a crisis shouldn't we be building astronomically large amounts of housing everywhere maybe um and the scale of middle housing potentially being more compatible with historic places but maybe not satisfying the needs of the housing crisis um is that kind of where so I mean for us our strategy is we have to start somewhere um and if you look I mean if you go so I have if you're an architecture you might like this other paper I wrote called zoning by a thousand cuts these are all free downloadable online but it talks about all of the not just those three stats that I showed you in the zoning atlas but a hundred pages worth of the download of what we collected in the zoning atlas including all kinds of minimum parking requirements height caps lot coverage requirements um uh uh minimum unit sizes minimum lot sizes of course and how all of these combine together to really stifle housing and so it was almost it after we collected all this information and the level of districts across the state it was almost overwhelming to think about where to start because all of these little cuts do constrain housing in different ways and they don't necessarily even have the goals that they're intended to have so this idea that minimum that we hear a lot actually in light of our minimum lot size reform proposal that minimum lot sizes of an acre or more are good for the environment it's like no actually that's not they're really bad for the environment because they create sprawl they encourage more driving they use land they make us turn forests into lawns that were pesticide to you it's like the opposite and so it's very hard to know where to start and so that's where we started in Connecticut that's where they started to work and uh when they started zoning reform uh many years ago Vermont is doing similar so it's kind of an incremental process but um we sort of took it as uh you have to start somewhere and that's kind of where we where we started thank you I wanted to ask about uh as you mentioned New York has Hocles budget has a bunch of um zoning related reforms that I'm very excited about obviously California last year passed a number of bills how should we as preservationists think about other areas where that kind of state level action isn't happening and areas where perhaps at the municipal level preservation feels weaker than it should be I'm thinking of Philadelphia for example where preservationists have kind of battled to maintain some of the housing stock that does not have kind of the same like there's not the same shortage as in parts of California or New York so is this a movement which I'm very excited about like this is why I'm here um is this something that like is going to be in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York and then you know at some point the crisis will get bad enough that it moves to the state level of Pennsylvania or is there a way to kind of make a national movement even though I think like preservationists are dealing with different things in different places with regards to the housing shortage and affordability crisis okay so there's a lot of questions in there and I'm super excited that you're super excited um but um so maybe I'll start with this so last week um I published an op-ed in blueberg city lab called why we need a national zoning atlas and I actually think so there's people in Philadelphia who may be working on it um I actually met on Tuesday with some folks Wednesday it was yesterday okay yesterday with um some leaders out in Long Island who are considering not only investing in something like a zoning atlas but also investing in a housing movement like the one that we have in Connecticut they wanted to know kind of how we started so I think that there are good discussions um in in Philadelphia and in Pennsylvania generally about these issues um but I think in order for people to really understand why they need to engage they need to be able to measure it which is why I'm a big fan of developing zoning atlas type projects where you can see very clearly um how Long Island um uh Philadelphia and their suburbs around it zone and then you can see just right off the bat wow that's a really big problem it's impossible to read a zoning code if you're a non-architect non-lawyer it's impossible so what we did through our research was in 180 zoning jurisdictions across Connecticut we read 32 000 pages of zoning text we coded 2,600 zoning districts and we you know did did um 90 different characteristics of the zoning districts only about 25 of which appear in the zoning atlas but I just kind of throw out all those numbers to say if you document it you can just make endless arguments like these thousand cuts there's just like there's just endless things that we could do to make things better and but you kind of have to document it first that has helped to catalyze more advocates to what we've been doing and so I would say that you as somebody who might be able to sift your way through a zoning code much better than than others and who have friends who do GIS if you don't do it yourself you know I put up a methodology too um and that's been used I'm using it in my Cornell class they're using it in Minnesota, Chicago, other classes to start mapping out zoning atlases in those communities so I think one key is you know you're smart because you're here you know you yourself personally could start this kind of discussion this kind of thing from a preservation land use perspective and and create that nexus I mean I would love to see you all band together and create young preservationists for New York or something and start to say just put out press releases I mean that's kind of how we started and I had a meeting and then people said well join the coalition I said what coalition are you talking about I mean this is really just like me in the pandemic sitting at my computer saying somebody wouldn't meet with me about this and then it just sort of exploded and all this so you personally can do that I delegate to you the authority to create this movement because if you don't who's going to do it no one I mean you know that that's the thing about these conversations is that if you don't start the conversations you have a lot more power than you think and I can tell you you are going to be more organized online than many groups that are anti-housing everyone should join open New York in New York City yes and and open New York is is doing a lot of advocacy but they're not doing it from the preservation angle so the the and again the politics around these questions are really interesting because you know sometimes people think if you're pro-homes you're anti-preservation or you're anti this or but but that's one of the reasons why you you know the the special group that you will start can help to complement what open New York is doing one more hi Professor Brolin thank you for your lecture I just wondered what do you imagine as the new policy making forms to enable preservationists we to steer the changes to historic built environment because one of the takeaways from lecture for me is our role today is not only to fight against the changes but to steer to regulate these new changes brought by adaptation brought by energy retrofitting so I wonder what do we need on the front of policy making do we need a revised state level local level law do we need new design like guidelines do we need a revised review process or something else thank you yeah so I think any of those state local or national levels can provide guidance for specific issues so for example Colorado deals with wildfires maybe that's where the protocols on landscape changes to historic landscapes that allow for wildfire breaks occurs and maybe it sort of organically drifts up from communities that are addressing specific hazards I mean I don't have a prescription as to where exactly at what level or what they will say but I do know that without having those conversations and setting out goals it took many years to just do the flood guidelines at the national level so do we want to start at the state level somebody you know needs to get things moving and and I think that there are discussions happening now in a number of states and local governments too and I should say local governments have been so I mentioned a few innovations in local government when I ticked off the deconstruction ordinance and so on but local governments have also tried to address sea level rise in particular so Annapolis is one place that has some has done some thinking about that St Augustine Florida Newport Rhode Island so there are some local communities that are thinking about these issues whether they've entirely resolved them is another question but but they're out there and they're actually all talking to each other too so there's some hope well thank you for taking the time for traveling the distance to be with us and especially for being in person so