Legislating heritage can backfire
TASTES AND VALUES CAN BE ENCOURAGED; THEY CAN’T BE FORCED. — SOUPCOFF
It’s demolition by neglect, residents in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood complained to the Toronto Star on Monday as they bemoaned the state of a deteriorating heritage home in their midst.
The residents allege that the decline of the house is no accident; that the owners are deliberately letting it rot so they’ll be able to rebuild once the structure is beyond repair. (They can’t tear down and rebuild because of the heritage designation.)
“I can clearly see an open area at the top (of the house), where it peaks, and therefore (is) open to the air, the animals, rain and so on,” Albert Koehl, vice-chair of the Annex Residents’ Association, told the Star.
We don’t know if the residents are correct about the owners’ intent in this particular situation. But in general, demolition by neglect is a real and well-observed phenomenon.
And it can result in years of misery for a neighbourhood while a property is in awful shape but not yet awful enough to be deemed irretrievable.
The direct blame for demolition by neglect goes to the developers and property owners — the people doing the neglecting. On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that it’s the heritage designations themselves (or at least, the strict restrictions that they impose on property owners) that provide the perverse incentive for the abandonment in the first place.
It’s not an unexpected result when you think about it. Heritage designations are a crude attempt at legislating particular historical, cultural and esthetic values. But historical, cultural and esthetic values are intensely personal. You can’t legislate a reverence for Queen Anne revival style any more than you can legislate a fondness for kale.
Tastes and values can be encouraged; they can’t be forced. When you try to force them, you end up making things worse.
Take the house currently languishing in the Annex. If it was going to go, better it should have gone quickly with an efficient tear-down rather than be left to fail slowly, potentially inviting mess, trespassers and animal infestation to the area.
Preservationists would say, but such a house shouldn’t go at all. We must protect our heritage. The key is stricter enforcement. Crack down further on the owners. Yet it’s unclear why preservationists’ values — and ideas about what’s important in some imagined collective heritage — are the ones that should rule the day.
If a historical property can fetch way more money as a new condo building than it can in its current incarnation, that’s more than just evidence that developers are greedy opportunists. It’s an indication that on the whole, the property is valued more highly as a residential tower.
This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty of people who would rather keep the historical property as is. It’s just to say that in the grand scheme of things, if the total desire to preserve were stronger than the total desire to build, the preservationists would be putting in the highest bid on the property.
They wouldn’t be calling on government to legally deny permission to change the home’s historical front windows. They would own the home’s historical front windows and could keep them the same for ever and ever.
“Those most harmed by overpreservation are the urban poor and minorities,” write Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer in a 2016 National Law Journal article.
The restriction of new construction caused by preservation laws keeps the supply of housing low and the price of housing high. “This, in turn,” say Shapiro and Meyer, quoting the Manhattan Institute, “increasingly makes those (historic) districts exclusive enclaves of the well-to-do, educated, and white.”
They’re talking about New York City, but the description is an apt one for the Annex as well. There are more than 500 historically protected buildings in the Toronto neighbourhood, which remains higher income and home to fewer immigrants than the city’s average. (It’s a spot where successful academics and writers can live in huge houses and still call themselves bohemian.) Coincidence?
Because heritage designations also increase the costs and difficulties of renovations and improvements, they discourage middle- and lower-income owners from fixing or replacing parts of their homes unless and until they have no choice.
In this way, some of the many “demolition by neglect” cases may actually be “neglect by not having enough discretionary income to buy leaded stainedglass windows again this year” cases.
We’ll have to see what happens to the house in the Annex. Whatever that is, don’t expect it to be the last heritage property that ends up in disrepair.