 Good evening everyone. I'm Shannon Miller. I'm the Director of the Office of Historic Preservation. We're really excited to have you all here tonight. I know many of you were at the luncheon today, but wanted to make sure that those of you who weren't able to make the luncheon had an opportunity to hear about the findings and the report and to meet Dawn. And then we're also really excited to be in this building. The Mylon Building is such a great historic treasure. Thank you so much, Diane, for hosting us. And I know we promised, some of you may have come just because we promised that we would get to go to the penthouse. And we did not lie. You can go. There are people that will help guide you up there on the elevator. We just had too large of a group for the whole event to be upstairs, so that's a good thing. I will introduce Dawn in just a moment, but before I do that, I would like to recognize and thank Congressman Lloyd Doggett for being here. Such a pleasure to have you with us. The Congressman was able to join us at the luncheon today and spoke very eloquently, as always, about the importance of preservation and the missions and our hopeful listing as a national, I mean, I'm sorry, a World Heritage Site. So thank you so much for all of your support for preservation issues, both locally and nationally. Thank you. That's right. Just stay on the street. And so tonight what we thought we would do is I've asked Dawn to give you just a kind of high level overview of the report, so don't worry. You don't have to stand there for an hour listening to a presentation about every finding. But we wanted to give you an idea of some of the exciting things that came out during this study about the impact of historic preservation in San Antonio on a number of things. The study you will see is really aligned around the 11 cause areas that were identified through the SA 2020 process. So it's a great look at how historic preservation helps to advance those goals that were identified by citizens of San Antonio. Dawn is an internationally recognized expert on the economics of historic preservation. He is not an economist, but he is a real estate professional and certainly brings to bear a great deal of experience and insight into the importance of preservation in our local economy and beyond. I mean, Dawn talks about numbers, but he's also the first person to point out that there's more to the story than just the economic impact. Obviously, historic preservation is critical culturally and environmentally sustainable, and there are lots and lots of reasons why preservation is good and smart for our city. So with that, Dawn, please come on up. Thanks, Shannon. I'm kind of an apolitical guy, but I have to tell you, I'm in 11 Washington, so I'm kind of on the periphery of politics. It is, I mean, congressmen get invited to 10,000 things, and usually what they do is come in, wave, say thanks a lot for having me, and then go out the doors quickly as possible. Here, congressmen stay the entire lunch, including the kind of boring remark, and afterwards. So thank you very much for doing that. He can be forgiven because he's heard it all before, so thank you so much. Here's how I want to preface this. I've known Shannon for a long time, and we talked about this study, and I have done over the years a number of economic impact of preservation studies, nearly always at the state level. Well, Shannon says, okay, I want to do a study in San Antonio, but I want a couple of things different. Number one, I want to be done on a municipal level instead of a state level, because there haven't been many of those. And second, I want you to find, measure the stuff that you always measure about jobs and incremental difference of heritage tourism and blah blah, but I don't want to stop there. I want you to think harder about the additional ways that, in fact, historic preservation affects the life, economic and other, in a city. And so that's how we kind of evolved to taking this great SA 2020 document that all of you and 6,000 of your closest friends participated in over years to get to pick out these 11 cause areas, each of which starts out with a vision statement, you know, in education, in the environment, whatever. Here's our vision statement of what we want San Antonio to become. And so our basic question in this study was how does historic preservation advance that vision? And we found two or three or six metrics in each of those areas that, in fact, you don't have to be a preservationist. Here's how preservation helps transportation or helps growth management or helps vibrant economy, those kind of things. So we looked at them and one of the non-numerical conclusions of the study is what is, in relation to this SA 2020, historic neighborhoods play one of two roles. Either they are already reaching those goals. They're already today in those historic neighborhoods doing what SA 2020 says the city ought to do. Or second, they serve as a model on how the city or other neighborhoods, the city as a whole, ought to approach things. And so there's even in just kind of understanding where the city wants to go, there's a lot to learn from the historic neighborhoods. Now, in fact, the story is not very many people, only about two and a half percent of the population of San Antonio live in the historic districts. And again, how most of our measurements were, what does the historic districts look like? Demographically, economically, value, whatever. How do the historic districts look? And how does that compare or contrast with how the city as a whole looked? And so many of our measurements are, here's what's true about the historic district, and here's what looks like for San Antonio. Let me give you a couple examples there on the non-economic side. Quality of life, big variable. And of course, on the top of almost anybody's quality of life criteria are I want it safe and I want good schools. And so that's kind of the top of the list. But once you get past those two, more and more are diverging these urban quality characteristics, things like walkability, things like mixed use, things about reduced commuting time, things like proximity to the bus stop, all of which are becoming more and more important in quality of life criteria. Well, what we learned is almost every historic district in San Antonio outperforms the city as a whole. On walk scores, you all know this thing called walk score, taking any address in America on the computer, on the internet, and you get a walk score from one to 100. Every historic district, but one, has a better walk score than does the city as a whole. Then the people who invented walk score invented the bike score. Every historic district came out better on the bike score than did the city as a whole. Then they came up, well, we ought to have a transit score, and that includes things like how close is the public transportation? How often do they come? What's the means of transportation? Every historic district outperformed the city as a whole. Now, I've been, for years, been looking at value, because as Shannon said, my background is really in real estate economics. So for years, I've been looking at the patterns of value change and the incremental value in historic neighborhoods versus other places. Well, I'm so kind of unsophisticated for a long time. I just signed all of that well. People like this historic stuff, and so they're paying extra. Well, that's certainly part of it, but it's not all of it. There's a whole bunch of these characteristics of kind of good cities, good urban life that are true in those historic neighborhoods that are less true other places, and people are paying for it. And so let me tell you how they're paying for that. We looked at, literally, it must have been a million times 15, 15 million data points for property values in San Antonio between 1998 and 2013. So we looked at the property values of every residential property in every one of those years for that old period. And we then converted that back down to dollars per square foot, which is the kind of way you measure it, and see what the value change was in categories of properties. Now, think about that time period. You had the end of the 90s in the first half of the 2000s where real estate prices were going up on a kind of opium-driven level, just lunatic appreciation, and then there was the real estate crash, and then depending where in the country it's kind of stabilized and starting to climb back in some places. Here's what we learned over that period, and we made three distinctions. We said properties in historic districts, properties in neighborhood conservation districts, which aren't historic districts as we did count overall, the data from them, and the rest of the city. What did we find is that in the growth years that the neighborhood conservation districts moved pretty much in parallel with the city a little better, that historic districts outperformed them both. And then when the decline came with the real estate crash, the historic districts started declining later than the rest of the districts, and they started recovering when the other two categories were just leveling out. So in the up years, and in the down years, and in the stabilizing years, the historic districts outperformed them all. Now, you say, okay, that's good, but those historic districts, that's all a bunch of rich people, so who cares if a guy's house worth a million is not worth two million? But first of all, not true at all, that we looked at the average value per square foot of houses in all of the residential, all of the historic districts that have a residential component, looked at the average value per square foot in those houses, and then looked at the average for the city. Literally half of the historic districts fall below the city's average and half above in terms of their value per square foot. So these were both relatively prosperous neighborhoods and relatively less prosperous neighborhoods, all of which went better on the up curve, less on the down curve. Now a real significant consequence that now people at HUD and FHA and the Mortgage Bankers Association and bankers and savings amount, people need to be paying some damn attention here, because what we found in San Antonio is consistent what we found now in five other places, and that is the foreclosure rate in historic districts decidedly less than in the rest of the city. Rich ones and poor ones doesn't matter, lower, significantly lower foreclosure rates. Now that's not because I don't think people in historic districts never get fired or never run their credit card bill up too much and never get divorced. I think what's happening is that when the market's bad, going down is there's the economics geek term would be downside volatility, but there's less decline in property values. So if I get in financial trouble, I can get that property sold before it goes to the foreclosure process. So we looked at it here in San Antonio, but it's absolutely consistent with what we found in Connecticut, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Utah, for God's sake, very different places, with the same answer, lower foreclosure rates. And then the other thing, and maybe one of the coolest findings of all of this, and again, I'm just going to kind of hit some highlights and I'm more than happy to take whatever questions, comments, or go back to Washington, you communists, things, whatever you want to say. But one of the most interesting things is here you have a city that's very proud of its diverse cultural heritage, not just its cultural heritage, but its diverse cultural heritage and in San Antonio, and I've been, you know, I don't mean I'm expert like you are in the city, but I've been here lots of times in the last 30 years, the real appreciation in this city of the integration of those cultural traditions, the mixing of this not just a place with cultural diversity, but that diversity is shared broadly. So we looked at these 13 or so historic districts that have significant residential population. In fact, as a whole, they are virtually the mirror of the demographics, socio-demographics of the city as a whole. Here's a city that is 63% Hispanic, historic districts are just a little over 60% Hispanic, virtually the same number. The same share of household composition of families with children, couples with no children, whatever, virtually a mirror. The only place where there was a bit of a skew, where the historic districts were better proportionally than the city as a whole, were in neighborhoods, were in households with income under 25,000, and those over 150,000. There were more of those categories in historic districts, so more of the poorest, more of the richest in the historic districts, and that's hardly a thing to quarrel about, but the rest of it was just a mirror and the racial distribution, everything. There's no statistical reason that should be true, that for 2.5% of the population should reflect the proportions of the whole that that's exactly what is happening in these neighborhoods. By the way, this is a Hispanic majority city. The 11 out of the 13 historic districts have the Hispanic majority, the same kind of allocation. Now, I think, hopefully it's not from all of you, but I think that there's probably some people in San Antonio that look at King William, say, yeah, yeah, that's a great historic district, but that's all where those kind of rich people, they all live there. Well, there's plenty of people, by the way, if you didn't know, King William is one of the great historic neighborhoods in America, and yeah, there's some rich people who live there, but you know what, the share of population in King William with household income of 25,000 and below is virtually identical to the share of the population of that income bracket in the city as a whole. There are more people living in, almost twice as many people, living in King William with household incomes under 50, than there are over 150. So this is not, there's the Anglo-rich enclave at all that I expect, at least there are some in San Antonio that think and elsewhere. The other thing, and then I'll shut up and take some questions. I've been paid, so I don't have to say these nice things in order to get my final check on this contract. One of the areas of the SA 2020, one of the cause areas was civic engagement, and we kind of struggled, how are we going to figure out the role of that civic engagement? Well, what we ended up doing is looking at the civic engagement events, outreach activities that in fact the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation does, and they do a gazillion of them. They do stuff in Archaeology Week and Preservation Week. They do things with people who can afford to get dressed nice and go to the Preservation Prom. They do a run for kids, a run for adults. They do so damn many things. I'm telling you, I do not, and I visit 100 cities a year, and I've been doing that for 30 years, and I have some contact with preservationists and all of them. I don't think there's another city in America that does more aggressive outreach into the communities on all kinds of levels than does the Office of Historic Preservation here in San Antonio. It's extraordinary. It is pretty cool. So with that, I'll just shut up and be happy to take whatever questions that come up. I made them all up. That's actually a great question, and because we had about 30 or 35 different numerical measures and they came from a lot of sources, some of them came from the census data. Some of them came from the city's property tax records, and by the way, the city of San Antonio and the county were very helpful in providing all kinds of data. Some data we got from, we purchased heritage tourism data. We purchased foreclosure data. We used for job measurements of an econometric model called Implan. We also purchased and applies to various activities. So out of the 30 or 35 metrics, we probably had 15 or 18 different sources of those numbers kind of depending on what there was to look for. Walk score, we got from the walk score people, which we applied by the way to every block in every historic district. Wide variety of sources. Yeah. That being the case, it seems to be five or four sources like where the data came from in the charts. The point was that the charts ought to reflect where the data came from. That's a fair critique, I think. We made a conscious decision not to. And it wasn't at all to avoid transparency or to pretend. And the reason was, very frankly, is that we wanted it to feel like and to be open as a kind of readable, reader-friendly document as opposed to somebody's master's thesis. That doesn't seem to be true. In today's date, because there have been two thousand and ten data consensus, aren't these searches you can change dramatically in four years? It would be worth knowing where they came from. That's a fair comment. Thank you. Yeah. Two questions. The first kind of simple yes or no. We talked about the downturn of volatility and how the disorders are less effective by volatility in that context. Didn't that lead to an increase in turnover because those people could? And how do you look in southern house? Good question. I don't know if the amount of turnover changed that much. What did change was the... So the only thing we measured really in that regard was the sizable lower degree of foreclosure. We looked at some data that frankly was pretty inconclusive about numbers of sales per year since the recovery, and there didn't seem to be huge differences, at least not enough to try to make a case for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the question about... So you have people of relatively modest resources living in a neighborhood where the prices might go up and property tax is going up, and is there any recommendations about some form of assistance to... you know, focused on them? And again, this is kind of a philosophical thing, is I'm convinced that reports that are analytical should not also be reports that are recommending. And the reason for that kind of position, and I know that there are plenty of honest, credible people out there who view it differently, but when you're starting out with the goal for the recommendations, there's at least the risk of kind of skewing the data to come up with the recommendations you want to give. So we specifically said we're going to write the analytic report, not recommendations, hoping that, in fact, somebody will take the next step and say, ah, based on this, we ought to be doing X. Now, having said that, so yeah, have we made recommendations in that regard? No. Now I'm an independent reader looking at this and said then what we need to do as a city, that historic neighborhoods are not just about the old buildings. Historic neighborhoods are the character and the quality of the human beings who live in those buildings. And so it is an issue that we need to address. But the trouble is, you can't afford to address it after it's all done. So we need to figure out early on how we intervene, how we help people who want to stay in the neighborhood, stay in the neighborhood. And at a point where we can do it cost-effectively. So in fact, we've just been kind of brainstorming today about ways, are there ways to have kind of early indicators of where this might be a place that might become an historic district or a place that might see a flood. And so we can intervene early and kind of make the difference. This is a very difficult issue and neighborhoods inherently change. There's no such thing as neighborhoods that they're going one direction or another. But the issue is not the change takes place, but the speed of that change. That that's what becomes so psychologically and politically and sociologically disruptive. So we need to figure out how to mitigate the pace of the change, but we need to identify kind of early indicators, early on to make that happen. Yeah. As a follow-up, I live in a conservation district. And I hear so much that there wouldn't be stumbling blocks. I would say that the conservation district is kind of like historic and draining. Yeah, okay. That does happen a lot. One of the biggest pushbacks of is, again, my neighborhood, for example, eight years ago, it was $15,000. Well, now it's like 40. Those 15,000 people, while people aren't making more money, just people who live in the neighborhood, they're graphoids, and there are schools who are skewing the graphoids because there's not that many of them compared to the people that have lived there for more generations. So I think that's something, if that were addressed with our legal office, I think it would be so much easier to turn the cultivation system into a historic... Yeah, and I concur with that. And to your point as well, I think that the most effective public policy strategy for historic preservation is to have a good toolbox of both carrots and sticks. And I don't think if you only have rules that you can or can't do that. They just don't think it works. And I think what happens, if you only have incentives, is that the most die-hard tea party, property rights, independent person, government entirely guy becomes like the welfare mother thinking that every incentive is an entitlement. So I think that there needs to be a balance of those things, and you need to look at the neighborhoods and what kind of tools is needed for what neighborhood. Any others? Well, I'll hang around a while. So thank you very much for coming and good luck. Congratulations.