Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn

by Aaron Passell

Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice. In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color.

Through rich case studies of Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn, neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community building and bottom-up revitalization.

Featuring compelling narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving Neighborhoods is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences.

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 19, 2021

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is essentially an attempt to defend historic preservation laws against charges that they promote gentrification. These laws make it difficult to alter older buildings, thus impeding the creation of new homes and businesses. Passell focuses on two cities, Baltimore and Brooklyn.

In Baltimore, Passell shows that even landmarked neighborhoods experienced significant white flight; on the other hand, these areas tended to become more educated and more affluent, compared to nearby non-landmarked neighborhoods. On the other hand, Baltimore's citywide decline is so precipitious that I am not sure that the word "gentrification" is an accurate label for anyplace there.

Passell's treatment of Brooklyn is far more heavy-handed. He seems to be aggressively trying to defend pro-landmarking neighborhood activists. For example, he writes that one neighborhood "was threatened by development"- as if housing for new residents is a "threat." He also writes that landmarking "is the primary apparatus available to residents to intervene in a process of gentrification" and that neighborhood preservationists are working "to resist speculative development that speeds an already rapid process of gentrification." If I understand this language correctly, Passell seems to believe that by preventing development, landmarking slows gentrification.

But in fact, the landmarked neighborhoods he profiled did in fact gentrify. He admits that the rate of increase in college graduates in "all three central Brooklyn neighborhoods [profiled] outpaces increases at the borough, city and national level" (p. 106). In all three neighborhoods, housing prices increased threefold from 2000 (p. 107).

At best, landmarking completely failed to prevent gentrification. In fact, landmarking might have actually accelerated gentrification by impeding the creation of new housing (a possibility that Passell overlooks).

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was just not interesting enough. The research questions didn't captivate me and did not produce satisfactory answers.