CONCEPT HAS POTENTIAL BUT ALSO INHERENT RISK
Recently, the city of San Diego invited community members to share their thoughts and input on a recent draft of a document called the Hillcrest Focused Plan Amendment LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement. This statement will be a tool used in historic preservation planning to assist in the identification, evaluation and possible designation of Hillcrest as an LGBTQ+ Historic District. These efforts to designate Hillcrest are compelling because we want so badly to preserve our history — we all do. But the matter of preservation is more complex than that. The purpose of historical preservation should be to preserve and highlight the history of stigmatized spaces that have held significant historical value in our society.
While it's important to preserve historic resources, it is perhaps even more important to examine who benefits from designating a neighborhood historic, who makes the decisions as to what signifies historical value and the manner in which such decisions are made.
In Villanova University professor Whitney Martinko's book “Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States,” she considers the history of historical preservation and how the process itself is a reflection of our culture's social and economic values. The issue at the center of this reflection is the competition between the pursuit of personal profit and the value placed on how the community benefits from deeming a site or neighborhood “historic.” The manner in which the preservation is carried out is a value statement, particularly when it comes to considering whether the goal is to preserve the history of LGBTQ+ people or to make LGBTQ+ people the objects of preservation.
There are examples in contemporary society of historical preservation that have genuinely served the public interest. The Bay Area's Transgender District, which boasts a “reverse gentrification model” led by transgender women of color, was founded in 2017 by three Black transgender women as the first legally recognized transgender district in the world.
This effort has been successful in creating an environment that celebrates the “transgender tipping point” in the United
States while maintaining programs including a housing subsidy program for transgender, nonbinary and intersex people in the Bay
Area, an entrepreneurship accelerator program meant to help queer and transgender Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) people who aspire to start their own businesses and a visual storytelling project where community members can share their stories in their own words as a way to preserve their history and reclaim their narrative.
Their efforts have been successful in benefiting the community precisely because Black transgender women led this effort as a way to prioritize and center the health, safety and success of their community.
By contrast, historical preservation efforts in other neighborhoods have been found to cause perpetual damage to the affordability of the city where the ones who benefit from housing in such neighborhoods are the extremely wealthy. There are also an alarming number of examples of historical preservation efforts (too many to name) that have been led by mostly wealthy, White, cisgender men who stand to benefit from development of housing in historic neighborhoods. Franklin Vagnone, the founder of Twisted Preservation Cultural Consulting in New York, says, “Historic districting and code requirements are a contemporary form of ‘redlining,' which excludes a diverse economic group of people from actual land ownership.”
Housing in historic neighborhoods can increasingly be in high demand, particularly in neighborhoods that already have strong real estate markets like there is in Hillcrest. The social and economic implications of urban historical preservation, like efforts in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, have led to gentrification. Development of such areas are overwhelmingly not community-minded and are often antithetical to what should be the purpose of preserving stigmatized spaces — to somehow benefit the public whose history is being preserved.
As Martinko reminds us, preservation has always been about “managing change in a modern nation.” During the last 18 months, we have all witnessed structural racism play out on a global stage with elevated COVID-19 infection and death rates among BIPOC people. We have also witnessed a global response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others that clearly reflects contemporary displays of structural racism in the form of police violence in the United States. It is imperative that we continue to push back against practices that are commonly racially divisive, classist and elitist. The process of historical preservation can be one such practice.
Ultimately, the idea of designating Hillcrest as a historic neighborhood is not a bad one. But without the proper care and attention to how this might affect those who live there, we will most likely see in time that these efforts were put forth as a way for the wealthy to preserve their own wealth.