Philadelphia's Preservation Crisis

Like many publicly operated organizations, the city's preservation task force has already proven itself useless. That's a chore in itself given it isn't even a year old. From HUD to the EPA, sometimes I wonder why we invest so much in publicly operated groups. Given their political nature, they shift in purpose through administrations and are often defunct byproducts of campaign promises that never fully emerge. 

There's simply no money in altruism, and like for-profit corporations that serve only Wall Street, publicly funded advocacy only subsists as political stock. 

Simply put, the investment in public preservation advocacy would be better spent on the organizations that have no vested interest in demolition and redevelopment. The very fact that private developers, publicly traded firms, and a City Council that banks political capital from redevelopment is in any way involved with the city's Historical Commission, Licenses and Inspections office, or Design Advocacy Group is a huge conflict of interest. Preservation and its impact on our urban fabric should be left exclusively to the experts trained in historic preservation with no interest in anything else, and its autonomy should be heeded. 

In nearly all realms of public life, officials defer to privately funded experts. Allowing the Historical Commission, a tag tag gang of bureaucratic flunkies, to decide what goes, often at the behest of millionaire property developers claiming economic hardship, is no different than Betsy DeVos running slipshod through our public education system. Why are we outraged by one and not the other? Both are charged with one responsibility, enacting the opposite. 

Of course granting private groups like the Preservation Alliance absolute power over historic preservation is a tough sell. There's the knee-jerk assumption that private advocacy with too much authority can run rampant over the financial realities of any municipality. But time and again, advocates - from preservationists to gun reformists - have proven themselves nothing if not compromising. Barring the most storied of historical sites, only facades command preservation in Philadelphia (though the loss of the Boyd Theater's auditorium may, hopefully, challenge this caveat). 

The preservation crisis in Philadelphia can't be understated. Arguably as historic as Boston but considerably poorer, a recent influx of residents, mostly young or empty nested, has overtaken the priorities of our schools and our beleaguered history. In the decades since the New Deal era, Philadelphia's history survived in a preserved decay, uncataloged and untouched by the happenstance of neglect and a lack of development. Enticed by unfamiliar growth for the first time in nearly a century, City Hall and the campaigns of all those within have been fixated on the city's transformation, more often than not to the detriment of our history.

Charged with the task of organizing that history, private groups are so bogged down with the need for proposed landmarks threatened by development that only the most notable find a home on their lists. And even then, it's meaningless when the Historical Commission is so liberal with granting hardships to developers who simply don't want to salvage a portion of a facade. Meanwhile, incidental row homes built to last forever are routinely swapped out, blocks clear-cut, for new construction chock full of amenities, aimed at transplants with no concern for history, constructed to last maybe a few decades. 

When America's economy finally began to rebound from the Great Depression in the 1980s, it was through a culture of disposability. Everything from phones to cars to homes are designed to be temporary, and it's become our biggest enemy. Preservationists haven't been able to recon with the profitable nature of development itself, acting on the blind assumption that most people would like to save old buildings, and sacrifice luxury and convenience to do so. The only way they can move past this, and possibly be expected to professionally interact with and influence the very nature of our disposable culture is by granting them the autonomy and authority to do what they are academically prepared for: protecting our history in spite of developers equally vested in profitably maximizing every square inch.

City Hall can't be expected to do this, and maybe we shouldn't want it to. American culture, as much as our fickle desire for fast fashion housing, is driven by individualistic civic engagement. Maybe it's time we hand the reigns of preservation power over to those who actually care about it.