What Local Historic District DOES NOT do: · Does not regulate paint colors · Does not require repairs or renovations to be made · Does not increase taxes beyond normal increases for the City or County · Does not prevent additions · Does not prevent non-contributing homes from being demolished · Does not require use of historic materials or historic building methods · Does not require that you open you home to the public · Does not restrict routine maintenance of properties
What Local Historic District DOES do:
· Recognizes that Oakhurst has a distinctive historic character important to the overall character of the City of Decatur
· Encourages creative and compatible development with historic areas
· Requires that a Certificate of Appropriateness be obtained for exterior changes to contributing properties, demolition of buildings, and new construction.
· Applies only to major renovations to the exterior of your home. Interior renovations are not restricted.
We understand that the City Commission discussed the proposed local historic district with the boundaries set by the HPC last night at their regular commission meeting. The commission asked that the City of Decatur staff gather additional information related to the proposed district including the cost of conducting the necessary survey of the area. The commissions concerns were also discussed. The minutes to the meeting should be available soon on the City of Decatur website.
10 comments:
It seems like these new boundaries involve an awful lot of homes and people. Isn't it unusual for any city to make such sweeping changes to an area this large without doing feasibility/impact studies?
That is for all intents and purposes what the City staff and HPC will be conducting in this early part of this process.
Oh, I wish that was true! There is no one on the city staff or the HPC who is qualified to conduct either impact or feasibility studies. No one has done either one for any of the other historic districts.
The HPC/City Staff are conducting reviews to determine eligibility for historic preservation status as defined by state definitions as well as the documentation for each property.
Impact studies delve into how a specific change will affect economic growth, real estate values, existing area culture/diversity/dynamics, traffic flows, etc. In the process being conducted now no resident input is considered. Impact studies would include how the current opposition and resident resistance would affect the success of the change being studied.
If this nomination doesn't produce some form of protection, or some zoning change that slows down or stops the demolition and incompatible in-fill, I'm going to nominating my street as a local historic district. Stopping this process isn't going to stop the issue.
From the surface, it appears that the city's view of the in-fill problem should be handled with local historic districts. If the people that don't want local historic districts want to stop them they need to petition their city commissioners to address the in-fill problem and demolition some other way. If not the local historic districts will continue to be nominated.
"...they need to petition their city commissioners to address the in-fill problem and demolition some other way...."
That makes sense to me. What if the City got serious about that, and appointed a task force of residents from all around Decatur to study the issues. The task force could put together some recommendations about how the City should address the infill problems, and then we could go from there....
...oh, wait a minute, they DID do that. The recommendations are on the table right now. Shazzam!
One,
No local historic district is a very good answer to the demolition and in-fill problem because in our city 90% of the time a historic house has to be demolished to make way for the new infill. LHD will address 90% of the issue. Local historic districts are not needed unless historic resources are being destroyed. The in-fill is causing this destruction. So yes historic preservation is the issue. With that being said, I have a feeling that if the issue could be addressed some other way it would satisfy most of the LHD proponents.
...but if it isn't address these LHD nominations are going to continue.
How do the nominators feel about all of Oakhurst having informal vote to see where everyone stands on the issue? Would the nominators withdraw the nomination if majority voted against lhd?
Once again, would that fix the real problem? Even if the proponents agreed to withdraw their nomination, there is nothing in the process that requires the HPC to accept the withdrawal. It is in their hands alone now as their actions last week indicated. And there is nothing that prevents a new nomination that starts it all over again. Let's try to fix the process so that preservation ordinances can't be used to override zoning - and can't be enforced without majority approval.
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