A historic district nomination presents another test for DC preservation law

North of Howard University and directly abutting the campus of the Old Soldier’s Home, Park View is a fairly typical Northwest DC neighborhood. Last month, ANC 1A submitted an application nominating 188 properties in the northernmost two blocks for historic designation.

If the Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) votes in favor of the application, the “Princeton Heights” section of Park View will become the latest historic district in DC. This would mean the 188 contributing properties included would gain local and national recognition, as well as an additional design-review process for proposed exterior changes or new construction.

Federal and District preservation laws require that properties nominated for historic preservation meet at least one of a list of criteria for designation. In this case, ANC 1A, has nominated structures built in the Princeton Heights subdivision of Park View under National Criterion A regarding social history and Criterion C regarding architecture. But the application makes a weak case that strains both.

Social history

National Criterion A provides that a nominated property should be “associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history.” I’ve outlined before how this criterion in particular creates political problems for the HPRB, which is in practice forced to judge which communities’ distinct histories are more worthy of designation than others. But this nomination’s weakness is actually its universality. It’s more focused on this section of Park View’s connection to overall trends in DC history than anything unique to Park View itself.

To Criterion A, the application outlines two historic patterns Park View broadly, and Princeton Heights specifically, represent:

1. “In terms of Community Planning and Development, the historic district illustrates the transition of a part of the District of Columbia from rural farmland to suburban neighborhood as several different speculative real estate developers began to buy, subdivide and build upon the land to accommodate a growing city population.”
2. “The Park View Historic District is also significant under National Register Criterion A for its social history (African American) illustrating the changing racial demographics of the residential neighborhood from white to Black in the mid-twentieth century”

Both of these things are inarguably true, and the nomination extensively documents the detailed history of how these trends played out amid Princeton Heights. But this history isn’t particular to these properties; it’s the story of DC at large. This section of Park View is a fine example of a neighborhood that started as rural farmland, was home to white families during the Jim Crow era, and saw its racial demographics reverse in the mid-century. But it’s not the first, best, or a particularly notable instance.

For example, the Bloomingdale historic district was designated under the exact same criteria for the same trends. Comparatively, though, Bloomingdale is older and tells that story through its built environment more concretely: the district includes individual houses whose occupants famously legally challenged racial covenants and cleared a path for more Black residents to move in.

The Park View application’s most notable contribution to the meta-narrative of mid-century demographic shifts is how the three government buildings included (the school, playground and firehouse) were forced to desegregate in response to the changing neighborhood. However, all three of those properties are already designated as individual historic landmarks, and are not even located within the Princeton Heights blocks nominated. The school and rec center are below the otherwise southern boundary of this nominated district, while the firehouse is the sole property included across both of Georgia and New Hampshire avenues. The application ends up gerrymandering its way through the neighborhood to encompass these properties without also including any of the adjacent houses.

All that gives 1A’s Park View nomination strong parallels to the Colony Hill nomination that came before HPRB at the beginning of 2021. That nomination made a nearly identical Criterion A argument: It claimed the neighborhood was a good example of broader residential development trends that occurred in DC in the twentieth century, but did not identify much that was unique to Colony Hill. HPRB subsequently found the nomination’s argument insufficient and voted against designating the district under the social history criterion.

There’s no clear reason why the Park View nomination offers a more compelling case than the somewhat-specious social history argument of the Colony Hill nomination.

Architecture

The other criterion on which ANC 1A’s nomination rests, National Criterion C, requires that a historic district embody “the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values, or represents a significant and distinguishable entity whose components lack individual distinction.”

In the aforementioned Colony Hill case, while the application failed to meet the social history criterion, it was rescued by this one. Though a public witness and one board member raised doubts as to whether the buildings and design were a strong enough example of the architect and planners’ work and whether they were significant enough to the development of the District, the majority of the board ultimately voted in favor, finding Colony Hill met “the work of a master” element in particular.

The Park View application does not make as strong a secondary argument. Compared to its lengthy narrative description of the social history, the application hardly makes the architectural case at all. Only a few lines in the summary describe Park View’s design merit, concluding that the nominated rowhouses “conform to the basic Washington Row typology, with decorative details that are derivative of Colonial Revival and Spanish Revival styles.”

Similarly to the social history argument, that interpretation gestures at the 188 buildings’ role in the District’s history broadly, but does little to distinguish them either individually, as a combined entity, or even as a subdivision with social history or physical characteristics exceptional to all other Park View subdivisions.

What (and who) is left out

The most important part of the application is what’s not in it. While in the mid-20th century, Park View residents switched from nearly all white to all Black, since then the trend has sharply reversed. In the last 20 years, the roughly four blocks included in this nomination have gone from a strong 76% majority of Black residents to a 37% minority just eclipsed by a 39% white plurality this past year.

Again, this change is not unique to Park View. As prices surge, a growing number of neighborhoods are effectively out of reach to disproportionately Black low- and middle-income families. How to mitigate and reverse that trend is one of the biggest policy conversations in DC right now.

Located immediately next to a Metro stop and along a central commercial and transit corridor, Park View is the kind of neighborhood that can and should be adding a significant amount of housing to help keep prices more affordable. In fact, the Office of Planning’s recent Housing Equity report set a target of adding 4,210 new homes (including 1,010 affordable homes) for the Mid-City planning area of which Park View is a part. But a historic district—even a tightly bound one that does not encompass all of Park View—will almost certainly make that task increasingly difficult, if not impossible within its borders.

At only 188 properties, a historic district that only applies to a small section of Park View is obviously not going to make or break that larger effort by itself; more housing will get built in other areas of Mid-City. But that kind collective buck-passing is how we got into a crisis of both affordability and segregation. If fair, affordable housing is such a priority, no neighborhood of any size, and no section of any neighborhood, should be able to opt-out of doing its part.

Whether ANC 1A intended that outcome—and I don’t think they did at all—is beside the point. The reality is that neighborhoods like Park View are currently resegregating. By making it even more difficult for new neighbors of even a slightly lower tax bracket to move in, a historic designation will double-down on that exclusivity.

A dangerous precedent

Of course, under current DC historic law, whether or not new housing can or should be built is not a factor for the board’s consideration. This inability to weigh preservation goals against social, environmental and economic ones is a flaw in the District’s historic system at large. Luckily for the board, it really shouldn’t come to that in this case. Because of precedents it has set for itself, HPRB should be able to sidestep the larger tangle of preservation processes basically forcing housing to be less accessible, and deny this nomination squarely within the bounds of the existing law. The application presents the same social-history argument deemed insufficient in Colony Hill, and an even shakier argument for its architecture.

Overlooking those flaws and approving the Park View historic district nomination anyway would break the floor of precedent and cement the board’s position as “whatever it takes to get to yes” for any proposed district that comes before it. The result would be a greenlight for any and all to apply for historic designation, whether out of a good-faith appeal for historic recognition or a bad-faith attempt to secure exclusionary privilege.