Send us your own experiences. Help your neighbors understand what it's like to experience HPO living.
Lets take a look at Myers Park, with real examples and half a decade of actual life within the Historic Preservation Overlay.
Recently, the Chair of the Board for The Tallahassee Historic Trust wrote an article for the newspaper which praised the benefits of preservation overlay rezoning and gave some really rock-solid statistics to clarify the overriding question of whether or not maintenance and improvements were impacted negatively. She quoted 95% approval of all applications for doing work in the Myers Park Neighborhood between 2003 and 2009. If we discount 2009, as being incomplete, we have six years of data. The 95% approval applied to every single one of the 91 applications.
There are about 230 homes in Myers Park. Do the math: 90 applications divided by six years equals fifteen applications approved a year. For 230 houses = only 1 out of every fifteen houses is doing any heavy maintenance or visible changes to their landscaping features or building? (minor, periodic maintenance is not an issue with the Historical watchdogs)
No birdbaths or picket fences going up anymore? No cute shutters or porch light fixtures? No driveways? No new energy efficient windows? No steps installed? No skylights? Nothing? No new doors? No porches? There is only one reliable conclusion to be drawn from this data. Obviously, Myers Park Neighborhood was absolutely perfect in 2003 and no further improvements or maintenance ever needs doing again. That's got to be the answer.
So, translating this information to the Lafayette Park Neighborhood, we can expect only one out of every fifteen houses to ever do a single bit of improvement or repair in any given year. Or looking at it the other way, each home can expect just one project of any size to occur every fifteen years.
Wow. Daddy is gonna love this! He hates it when Home Depot has a sale and he has to go putter around all weekend with his tools and shovels and be in the sunshine and get out his paintbrushes. We have reached perfection and can put all that stuff away. And, I guess we don't have to worry about providing any legal forms with architectural drawings and specifications and surveys and taking off work to attend meetings and explaining what the project would be all about for the 2,685+/- people who are invited by written notices six weeks in advance to review and speak against every application that is submitted.
WooHoo! Daddy is going fishing, instead. Six years of data on 230 homes is pretty solid stuff: There isn't going to be any more work done in the neighborhood.
One last item...that 95% approval in Myers Park? Are you curious what the other 5% was? Someone painted their house without permission...and was forced to sandblast it off!
Update 3-01-09...We have learned from comments in the Tallahassee Democrat Article by Laura Corbett that roofing permits comprised 56 of the 91 applications. Since roofing is not really an optional activity, this reduces the optional activity in Myers Park to just 35 voluntary home improvement projects in six years for 230 homes...After some serious head-scratching math, this results in a rounded off number of six projects per neighborhood per year, or only one project per house every 38 years! Obviously, there is a very real detriment to people improving their homes when the HPO re-zoning is in place. Thank you, Rod & Linda for pointing the way to this published report.
My experiences and observation in Myers Park are typical: The two wooden houses which were moved in have no part whatsoever in the history of the neighborhood, yet were determined to be "contributing" to the idealized fictional vision of what the history of the neighborhood should have been, if the Historic Trust could re-write it.
"Contributing" means they are held to the highest arbitrary standard that can be invented on the spur of the moment at a meeting of the Architectural Review Board, where residents are punished for trying to maintain their property. The owner of one of these homes, a blind man, asked me to help him get approval for putting up a wooden fence for his seeing-eye dog. The Architectural Review Board played with that poor man's project, threatening him with refusal, until I and another neighbor had to beg them to allow the fence. Later, when the fence installer said he had to cut a hedge at the property line, my neighbor moved the fence and abandoned two feet of his property rather than face the Architectural Review Board a second time to answer for the shrubbery.
The other moved-in house is suffering from the lack of a real foundation, and is gradually sinking unevenly into the ground. The owners are fine, quiet neighbors who don't seem to like people telling them what to do. It's obvious the house will fall down before they ever ask permission from the Historic Trust to do any repairs....So that house is becoming quite an eyesore. I understand their position, since I, too, refuse to be humiliated by the Architectural Review Board while they parade their power at every meeting. I will not spend $1200 for a property survey and another $1200 for a landscape architect to provide a fancy formal petition to put up four ready-made fence panels from the lumber yard.
My third neighbor ignored the Historic Trust approval requirements, put up a 12-foot fence section to obscure his view of the sinking house, and recently abandoned his home to foreclosure rather than deal with their approval procedures, among other problems.
A fourth neighbor started a small backyard shed, got stopped and caught up and entangled in the ARB maze of rules, and has abandoned the incomplete project for more than a year. It sits there, partly completed.