Ranting to /dev/null

I hope no one thought this was an earth-shattering realization.

I asked my prof about it after class and he said that it's been suggested, but that other factors are generally considered to be far more significant. Also, since the people who support historic preservation and oppose sprawl are generally the same people, there hasn't been all that much research into the opposite correlation.

He said that it's possible to apply for interim historic preservation when you file a building permit in certain municipalities in California, leading to the rather counter-intuitive situation of a historically-preserved building that hasn't been built yet. Weirdos.

There are degrees of historic preservation. Further, I suspect that the degree to which is promotes sprawl is rather minimal, given that the developer was looking to build in a specific location for specific business reasons, and the merits of one location are not the merits of another. Point being, it's not as simple as just picking a different, out-in-the-suburbs spot. Once you do that, you're talking a complete different project.

Yes, there are certainly more significant factors... but my general impression is that the folks in the urban affairs + planning department see a tension between preservation and density. Maybe historic preservation is only a small component of the forces tending towards urban stasis (I think that is probably correct), but I don't see why you wouldn't lump it in with things like density-limiting zoning regulations or development-hating neighbors -- they're all moving in the same direction (stasis). Whether they're right, wrong, some mix of the two or whether those are even the right terms for labeling them is another question entirely.

That's definitely a good point Rob. I can't really speak for other cities, but it seems to be that in Chattanooga historic preservation is working in favor of density, as there have been a number of notable cases in which a developer wanted to bulldoze a building to build a parking lot or a single story big-box structure, and the historic preservation folks along with some other organizations proposed to keep the building as mixed-use instead.

It's really expensive to build higher than 2 stories, and one of the ways to offset those costs is by just renovating an existing structure.

Sure... I wouldn't want you think I'm arguing that historic preservation is an intrinsically negative thing, or even that it always pushes in the direction of stasis (pretty much everything is more complex than that).