Guide Offers Tips On Renovating Older Buildings For Affordable Housing
To tackle the nation’s affordable housing crisis at the local level, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has issued a best practices guide to the nation’s mayors to reclaim older buildings and neighborhoods to create more affordable housing.
A product of partnership with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who also serves as President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Rebuilding Community: A Best Practices Toolkit for Historic Preservation and Redevelopment features success stories of older buildings and areas in the northeastern U.S. — including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania — that were transformed into new affordable housing.
“The best way to revitalize a community is to build on its strengths, to save and enhance the character that makes each neighborhood special,” said National Trust President Richard Moe. “In short, older and historic housing stock – and the neighborhoods in which it exists — can help solve our housing crisis. However, every day we demolish the very structures that could provide a solution to our housing crisis.”
From Fall River and Lowell, Massachusetts, to Lewiston, Maine, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the toolkit describes effective public policies, innovative financing programs, model partnerships, and powerful marketing and design programs that have stimulated housing rehabilitation.
While the approaches are diverse — ranging from “smart” building codes to public-private partnerships to reinvestment and tax incentives — they all share the idea that historic preservation can be a driving force behind revitalizing urban areas and increasing affordable housing.
“We hope communities big and small will use the tangible steps contained in Rebuilding Community to creatively address the affordable housing crisis,” said Wendy Nicholas, Director of the National Trust’s Northeast Office.
In cities across America, thousands of buildings stand vacant and thousands more are obliterated by poor maintenance and abandonment. Yet, these same structures can potentially provide affordable housing at a lower cost than razing and building new ones and stimulus for revitalizing historic neighborhoods.
Facts in the guide include:
— Almost a third of American households below the poverty line reside in older and historic homes.
— Replacing these homes — using the most cost-effective federal housing programs — would cost American taxpayers $335 billion, or nearly $1,200 for every person in the U.S.
— Historic homes are typically located where public transportation is available, while newer homes are usually in areas that require cars, heaping extra costs (36 cents of every dollar earned by families making below $12,000 annually) because no other transportation options exist.
To obtain a copy of Rebuilding Community or to learn more about the National Trust’s efforts to solve America’s affordable housing crisis, please call 617-523-0885. You can download the toolkit at www.nationaltrust.org. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a private, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to protecting the irreplaceable. Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Trust provides leadership, education and advocacy to save America’s diverse historic places and revitalize communities. Its Washington, DC headquarters staff, six regional offices and 21 historic sites work with the Trust’s quarter-million members and thousands of local community groups in all 50 states.
