It's ashame. Can they have "historic lite" districts that simply limits teardowns? Rather than requiring certain windows, doors, etc... I think that would be far more palatable and widely supported and would at least stop the historic bleeding.

by SG on Oct 21, 2008 1:21 pm  

Being designated as a historic district carries with it the requirement to adhere to Federal guidelines. Hence, I would think the idea of a "historic lite" district wouldn't work.

Besides, when you talk about certain doors and windows, you have to keep in mind that things like vinyl windows simply look bad and are the main objection within the guidelines for historic districts.

Yes, property owners cede some rights with historic designation, but those rights come with a degree of certainty.

I guess in this case, some percentage of the affected homeowners were able to shoot the whole concept down.

by William on Oct 21, 2008 1:49 pm  

I personally am glad they shot it down. It seemed to me to be a vehicle to stop all change, including good change.

As much as I'm no fan of McMansions, we have to recognize that these kind of evolutionary processes are what brought us the neighborhoods that the District has that are now considered historic. While we now look at all the buildings in places like DuPont as similar, I'm sure that was not always the case. They only look similar to us because we are decades out. The same could be said for Chevy Chase DC.

I also have a hard time with going to the government so you can tell your neighbor what they can and can't do. I mean seriously, if we're going to go with the concept of private property as one of the main tenents in our society, we need to be mature enough to recognize that it will sometimes lead to distasteful things. Yes, we might all be worse off with a McMansion there. However, there is much more pressing low-hanging fruit (like pedestrian safety for example) to tackle before we worry about telling our neighbor's what to do.

by Cavan on Oct 21, 2008 1:58 pm  

That's f***ed. While about 1/3 of the property owners expressed a "no" vote, the remaining 2/3 either said yes, expressed no opinion, or didn't vote. It's fair to assume that the people who didn't vote weren't dead set against, since they had the opportunity to vote no and didn't.

by Richard Layman on Oct 21, 2008 3:17 pm  

Hey, when you decide to not vote (or worse, decide that you don't care to figure out you can vote), you've made the decision that you're OK with the rest of the community making the decision for you. If you think the rest of the community is better informed or more wise than you are, great. If you think that you know better or are just as informed as the rest, then you should have gone to vote.

by Michael P on Oct 21, 2008 4:34 pm  

That would be true if everyone in the community had actually received the ballots.

by William on Oct 21, 2008 4:50 pm  

The citizens of Chevy Chase voted by almost 4 to 1 to express their opposition to bad law, worse regulation and rogue administration by DC's Historic Preservation Office and the Historic Preservation Review Board. That's what this survey was about. I know of no one in the community who opposes reasonable and legitimate programs of historic preservation.

by Allen Seeber on Oct 21, 2008 6:39 pm  

Allen, Having observed some of the misinformation being spread in the local rags, I'd say the vote was based far more on fear mongering than on fact. As you said "I know of no one in the community who opposes reasonable and legitimate programs of historic preservation. I know of no one in the community who opposes reasonable and legitimate programs of historic preservation." ... And by and large the HPRB's programs are more than reasonable. The HPRB is really the only the last resort of a neighborhood's own self-observance of good preservationist actions. The HPRB's enforcement is really pretty loose in the whole scheme of things. The fear mongerers were doing just that ... fear mongering ...

by Lance on Oct 21, 2008 7:24 pm