Quote:
Originally Posted by JET
They have so much old, ours is vanishing.
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I feel that groups like the HT need to share the blame for that though.
They are part of creating an economic climate in which there are little to no incentives to save older buildings, and the more they promote that tall (i.e. high property/commercial tax paying) buildings go elsewhere other than downtown, the more they end up having a role in creating the conditions for buildings to be torn down. Their entire argument about renovating heritage buildings is that developers should just do it out of the goodness of their own hearts. HT are ignoring economics at their own peril.
Creating the economic incentives to renovate heritage structures is how you save heritage structures. Preventing tall buildings from being built on empty lots is how you decrease the tax base and lose heritage structures.
I am not absolving all developers of any role, but HT owns part of this problem too. A real Heritage Trust would proactively propose realistic and proactive solutions to the actual problems, rather than acting as nothing but a road-block for change. HT reactively criticizes, but does not proactively propose realistic solutions (as opposed to "solutions" involving having the evil filthy rich developers spend their money to uneconomically renovate buildings).