Word: historicization
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Trendiness goes only so far. Money talks. The mania for preservation has been propelled for the past decade by federal tax laws. Developers who rehabilitate historic buildings can get back 20% of their renovation costs in the form of income tax credits, as long as they put the buildings to...
No matter how many splendid old buildings are refurbished, downtown revivification does not necessarily follow. The historic district of Charleston is an antebellum museum of architecture, but despite the surfeit of charm and platoons of tourists, the downtown was dying in the '70s. Developers proposed an un-Charlestonian remedy: a...
Preservation can set up a self-destructive cycle. When a historic neighborhood is restored, it becomes desirable and prices go up, and when prices go up sufficiently, developers think dollars per square foot, high- rise, wrecking ball. They wind up selling the view of a historic district from a condominium...
Yet the reflexive impulse to preserve everything, even the relatively new and banal, occasionally shows signs of getting out of hand. "People are just beginning to talk about ' '50s classics' now, which is a term that embraces some really appalling ticky-tack," says the British-born architectural historian Reyner Banham...
Hearteningly, the fate of reviving districts is not always black and white. Preservationists are not all chevre eaters and squash players. Among the thousands of tax-delinquent houses New York City has sold off during the past five years, more than half have been bought by black and Hispanic homesteaders...