Historic Easements as a Creative Planning Resource

As planners continue to seek ways to promote more housing nationwide, they look to historic districts and landmark properties to play a role. Many nonresidential historic buildings can be adaptively reused as housing. In residential historic districts there are opportunities to increase density compatibly, with additions, missing middle infill, ADUs, and more.

However, the economics may not prove feasible without incentives and the permitting process may be discouraging. Design review and permitting need to be more efficient and predictable in historic districts, and more financial incentives are needed. These are issues not only for existing historic districts and landmarks under local ordinances, but also for resources that are not protected, especially where there is no local ordinance or designation requires owner consent.

This presentation provides successful case studies in which creative new approaches to promoting preservation have been employed. These include:

• Form-based design standards (versus guidelines) that are tailored to different contexts in West Palm Beach, Florida;

• A system for voluntarily landmarking properties in Jackson, Wyoming; and

• A tax-deductible easement donation in Los Angeles that made adaptive reuse to residential feasible.
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  Learning Objectives:

  • Demonstrate how historic districts can expedite approvals efficiently with objective standards versus discretionary review guidelines.
  • Introduce the concept of historic easements as a planning tool in both financing and design review.
  • Discuss historic preservation zoning incentives, in addition to historic easements, that encourage landmarking of individual structures.