130 Fearing Street
If the Lincoln Sunset Local Historic District had been approved by Town Meeting a couple years ago and was now functioning the way the Dickinson Local Historic District Commission does, this family owned house could never have seen the light of day.
Not so much that LHD's have the power to stop new construction, but they have an inordinate amount of power when it comes to demolishing old structures to make way for new development.
Lincoln Sunset Local Historic District Study Committee meeting 6/2/15
In this case a barn that was claimed to be "historic" because a real estate agent once advertised that Robert Frost may have used it as a lonely writers garret. The Amherst Historical Commission was not convinced and rejected using their powers to enact a one-year demolition delay.
The next day owner You-Pan Tzeng demolished the structure and later flipped the vacant property to the current owners, who built the house that now fits snugly into the neighborhood.
At most the Amherst Historical Commission could only have delayed things one year. But a Local Historic District Commission could have delayed demolition permanently.
And it can be hard to build a new house or five-story mixed use building if you can't clear an old building sitting on that spot.
For instance the Amherst Historical Commission hit North Amherst developer Cinda Jones with a one-year demo delay on her big red barn at the entryway to the Mill District.
Without a change in zoning or Special Permit from the Zoning Board of Appeals the barn cannot be used for commercial activities related to the Mill District (like Atkins North) and is way too expensive to rehabilitate simply for storage.
Currently the barn screens the Mill District from viewers on Montague Road
Atkins North is reusing a barn that was in commercial zone
Thus it will probably be demolished next month when the one-year delay expires. But a North Amherst Local Historic District Commission (which is being talked about) could have simply said, "you can't tear down this barn. Ever!"
Which is easy to say when the preservation money is not coming out of your pocket.
A LHD could prevent her from taking the barn down but i think they cannot make her invest money to fix it. Incentives should encourage practical reuse, not incentivize leaving that fine structure to rot more for longer time.
ReplyDeletePeople with nothing better to do, Amherst is full of 'em. Oh yeah, save the whales too!
ReplyDeletePreserving a building here and there is fine but preserving an entire neighborhood is like leaving your dead child's room untouched for 30 years. I should know. At some point it's time to clean it up and move on.
ReplyDeleteThe NIMBY's secret weapon are all those little laws on the books that allow neighbor's to control other peoples' property.
ReplyDeletePrior to these rules when you violated someone's property rights you were looking down the barrel of their gun.
Now that we have these laws specifically for NIMBY's, when you don't give up your property rights you may be looking town the barrel of a gun, the town's gun.
That is the entire point of the the silly laws like the annual permitting of rented residences, so that people that don't own land, but want exert control on it, can do so.
Larry, on some topics you are clearly a NIMBY. When you disagree with the town you are not. Everyone is a Libertarian when it comes to their own body or home. The ones you really have to watch out for are the ones that become collectivists when it is not their stuff or body. They are the ones that don't have a consistent outlook, they are willing to redesign the world daily to get what they want despite others' fundamental rights, like ownership. They are willing to legalize theft, they us catch words like vote, authority and community. They focus heavily on symbols and brands other than their own.
So let's say that a hysterical district told Cinda that she couldn't tear down her barn. They couldn't make her repair it, could they?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't that be a violation of the 13th Amendment?
So you then get an increasingly unsafe structure that hopefully falls down before some kid goes in to it and the cops and firefighters have to go in after the kid.
Or you have what happened some years back in Worcester, and that killed six firefighters...