I’ve been a professional in historic preservation since 1972, having been born and raised in Salt Lake. I’ve visited Park City many, many times over those years from my home in Alexandria, Virginia. I have had preservation projects all over the mid-Atlantic and am finding repeatedly that the Secretary of Interior’s standards and guidelines, basically from 1980, are being used with very little modification all over the country. In general, these were intended for individual projects. There was never the expectation that they would be applied to an entire city center. We never dreamed how successful historic preservation might be.

The application of these outdated government standards has had several outcomes that I’m seeing many times over:

  1. Growth in historic cities of existing companies, organizations or families is greatly hindered as additions to buildings, or increasing the heights of buildings, is minimized. Successful businesses and organizations over a 40 year period have to move out.
  2. What might be considered to be the normal growth of a city center only occurs horizontally. The footprint of the city center expands and taller, newer buildings are on the perimeter. I believe that the core activities within a city move to the perimeter, including hospitals, police, courts, schools, major shopping and large grocery stores. This has an impact to the health and the vitality of the core.
  3. The only buildings left in the city centers generally have small footprints. These are good for restaurants and boutiques, but not for businesses that might double in size when successful. We then have historic districts in city centers where the highest and best use is tourism, rather than business, banking and public service.
  4. The worst part is the application of these design guidelines along with the fact that they have been totally integrated into the building permit and zoning regulations. While historic preservation and architectural design are generally based on subjective decisions of worth and merit, the repeated application of the guidelines over the years has resulted in increasingly rigid, prescriptive requirements for design. The "guidelines" are now black and white, it is either ok or rejected, because the same question has been faced before and the decision before must apply today. The interpretations of the guidelines are wound so tightly they will never be undone.

Our colleagues with new building design have coined the term "smart growth." This means it is innovative, sustainable, and meeting today’s needs. Too bad there is not a similar movement called "smart preservation."