Photo by Wayan Vota on Flickr.

Yesterday, I suggested some principles for what buildings or aspects of buildings should and should not be preserved.

I think the current system, where everything is either in a historic district or not, or a landmark or not, is flawed. HPRB has to make a binary, black-and-white decision to either designate something or not designate it. If they do designate it, it creates a very high bar for changes. If they don’t, there’s no protection.

Some say that DC’s system is set up in a way that makes designation easy, but also makes change easy. That may be true in theory, but doesn’t seem so in practice. At last month’s HPRB meeting, they debated a commercial building on Pennsylvania Ave in Capitol Hill that is only two stories but surrounded by three story buildings. The owner wanted to add a third story in a way that very closely matched the style of the rest of the building and of the row. But the board (in a close vote) chose to reject any change except one set back so far that it’s not visible from the street.

Some board members opposing the change talked about how this is a rare undisturbed row of houses. In other words, because this block has changed little, it shouldn’t at all. Even if the change was in keeping with the style of the block, some opposed it because they simply didn’t want to have anything change.

I don’t know all the merits of that case, and feel free to explain why I’m wrong if you think I am. But the current system sets up a default bias against any change, or else no protection whatsoever.

I’d like to see all buildings protected, but with a sliding scale of protection. I think all old row houses, like those in Petworth or Bloomingdale, should have some protection, for example. Every significant externally visible change should go through a combined design and historic review, but with a much expedited process in most cases.

Instead of protected vs. not, we should balance the value of a change against the historic impact on the building. Changes on less historic buildings would have to meet a lower standard, as would changes that don’t affect the building’s historic qualities. Changes that do affect historicity would get more weight if they improve the urban quality of the block. You could even come up with a sort of point system, quantifying how strongly historic the building is, how impactful the change, and how much the change improves or damages urbanism.

The challenge, of course, is making this more objective rather than simply more discretionary. I’d be okay with some discretion; the current system has gobs of it, and if the board at least were required to evaluate criteria beyond “is this historic and is this change affecting something historic,” we could push toward better resolutions. But perhaps the criteria can also become clearer as well, and (like zoning) based on a more definitive set of factors.

I’ll start working on objective criteria in upcoming installments. Do you think a system along these lines would be better or worse than what we have today?

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.