Quote:
Originally Posted by marothisu
How do you do that? Force the owners of the lots to sell? I am not sure why people have this notion that these lots are just up for grabs. People/companies own them. It's not like they're there for anybody to just take. I mean let's get real here. Do you really think that a developer would prefer to buy property with a building on it and tear it down? On average, doubt it - it costs more money and it's usually more time to start to build anything. I guess zoning could play into it, but - let's get real here about all of this.
You can start with land owners if you want this before you start with developers. And at the end of the day, it's probably harder because they have to pay less tax when there's nothing on the lot. If it's somewhere like downtown, then sitting on something for another year will probably net them more money at the end of the day and they probably really don't always have much reason to sell ASAP.
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Guys land owners and developers are the same group: property owners. There isn't a separate "development market" and "land market" it's the same thing. The problem is our current laws allow valuable historic structures to come down so developers feel free to view historic buildings as a land play. This needs to be banned.
How do your force the landowners to sell? Well you don't force anyone to sell, you ban demolishing historic buildings for the land under them. This reduces the number of parcels developers can build on which jacks up land values for parcels that can be developed which would include already mutilated historic structures, insignificant structures, and already vacant land. Since there are now fewer sites available to build on the value of the remaining sites increases (less supply = higher price) and the owners of these properties are incentivized to sell, not forced to. Think about it, if you own a side lot you are using as a garden and the price of lots is $50k in your area, that's not all that enticing to give up your huge yard, but if the price of that lot jumps to $200k or $250k, well now we are talking.
I just grabbed two beautiful historic brick structures (a 2 flat and a 4 flat) in a package which also included two lots. I totally restored both buildings including having two 18"x7' art glass arch windows rebuilt and restored as well as grinding and tuckpointing the entire facebrick and putting back the original charcoal colored tuckpointing (it's amazing how many buildings used to have charcal colored joints but some clown stuffed white or grey mortar in there later ruining the awesome red/black color combo). Now I'm sitting on the two plots of the land which I basically own cash for free because the bank only wants to lien the buildings. I'm just land banking them until the value of each lot is high enough that the bank will finance construction of a new two flat just based off the land value. As soon as land values rise I'll build, but until then I'll just keep buying buildings to rehab.
But I digress, my point is that land is virtually free in most of the city. The affordability crisis is a myth, if there really was such want on demand you wouldn't be able to pick up lots on the fringes of gentrifying areas for $5000. The problem is simply that we allow demolition of historic building stock. If we banned that the historic stock would just get rehabbed and the developers would move on to areas where they can find crappy frame buildings to raze or vacant lots to build on.
Finally, as depressing as it can be to live here and know what once was (like the Stock Exchange or the lot at Division and Damen that used to be a Shell and is now being developed), I'm actually consistently shocked by what wasn't. There are huge swaths of the city where you see endless vacnt lots and think "damn they razed a whole neighborhood", but you look it up and it was actually shitty single story industrial buildings with huge storage yards. Or in the case of my two lots it was a crappy frame workers cottage that burned down on one lot and a weird one and a half story brick cottage that was jacked up when they raised the street and had a frame first floor built under it. In fact, there are several buildings on my block like this still standing and most of them have very little preservation value. In 10-20 years they will likely mostly be torn down and replaced by larger, better built, modern structures.
But that's just it, we are 150 years into our history since the fire, Boston has been around for almost three times as long. I'm willing to bet that a lower percentage of Boston has been constructed between 1870 and 1940 than Chicago. But to us it appears they've preserved much more of the city than us because we see everything built from 1600's through now. Chicago is still young and, as I said before, many parts of it never even were. We are still building up our housing stock and yes, part of that is going to be losing some historic stock. The key is preserving most of what is worth keeping and making sure that the next layer of structures is worthy of standing next to what we preserve. We need to make sure that we are adding our next layer of history just as a city like Boston has layered hundreds of years of construction until virtually every building in the city is worth preserving.
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