Housing vs. Preservation

Everyone agrees that there’s a crisis of housing affordability in the US—see Wikipedia if you need some stats and citations. The true causes and best solutions can be debated, but practically everyone agrees that we should build like crazy, particularly higher-density infill projects. And another thing that practically everyone agrees is that permitting is generally too difficult and should be easier, to promote more new housing.

The tide of public opinion is strong and policy-makers have been listening and acting. In California, where the crisis is particularly acute, dozens of new laws have been enacted to make it easier to build housing. For example: SB9, signed into law in 2021, removed R1 zoning statewide, allowing a second dwelling on every residential lot. Bold!

So what about local rules about historic preservation? I don’t think it’s all worked out yet—historic preservation famously happens ‘in the streets’. But it seems that local rules don’t mean much anymore. Here’s an interesting case from Los Angeles, where an 11-unit townhouse development is proposed in Angelino Heights, LA’s first Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ). Credit to M. Nolan Gray, who flagged this on Bluesky.

It’s clear from the Bluesky thread and clicking through to the Reddit discussion that the sentiments are strongly for the housing project and against the HPOZ. I don’t know the project os the rules in detail, but I’m writing about the larger issue. The pro-housing people (YIMBY) are eager to portray the opponents as NIMBY and inappropriately using the HPOZ to prevent new housing. (Angelino Heights HPOZ info here.)

I have no opinion about this particular project, and its outcome is unknown. It may be that the opponents are reactionary NIMBYs. I simply find it significant, interesting, and potentially troubling that: a) LA’s HPOZ program, which I thought was very strong, might have no teeth at all; and, b) people interested in historic preservation may be automatically be considered to be anti-housing.

As an architectural historian and someone interested in solving social problems, I hope there’s room for people like me to be pro-housing, pro-density, and pro-historic preservation! Can someone be YIMBY for 99.5% of the city and NIMBY for 0.5%? (numbers being figurative not literal) Is the HPOZ designation dead? I hope not. Is there room to keep it alive and still build a lot of housing? Of course. I hope the title above—Housing vs. Preservation—is a false dichotomy.

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My own ‘self-interest’ is in the Gregory Ain Mar Vista HPOZ, already quite compromised. I saw a serious (academic) proposal to densify this neighborhood a couple years ago, which raised my eyebrows—there is so much other R1 housing all around which is not historic. (Gregory Ain Mar Vista tract HPOZ info here.)