The Historic Designation Committee was established by CPNO to explore community sentiment concerning City of Atlanta historic district status for Candler Park. A CPNO vote on Phase 2 is scheduled for March 20.
See Robert Craig’s Fake News Article Below
Responding to Fake News about Historic District Designation
by Robert M. Craig, Candler Park resident
Several misunderstandings regarding historic district designation encourage this response so that, in our present era of “fake news,” we do not form opinions based on falsities and uncompromising ideological dogma. I hold a Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in the History of Architecture and Urban Development. I served two terms on Georgia’s National Register Review Board, and I was appointed by Maynard Jackson to the Atlanta Urban Design Commission, serving as its chair. I dealt with historic district guidelines in both roles, and when decisions were to be made, the criteria that was repeatedly turned to was the neighborhood’s guidelines (what they wrote to govern themselves). Without such district guidelines overlaying city zoning (guidelines which varied by neighborhood), decision makers were forced to abide by generic regulations, zoning profiles, and developer demands which rarely conformed to a neighborhood’s individual needs nor the values residents sought to preserve.
I invite anyone with real concerns to participate in the committee’s work to design such protective guidelines for Candler Park, a process that is underway. I also encourage you NOT to be beguiled by misinformation being generated in order to solicit your negative vote in March. Many are false assumptions and incorrect characterizations advanced in order to stop this neighborhood-based effort at its outset. There will be ample opportunity to help include whatever may genuinely concern you that serves the community at large; unfortunately, there are some who wish to condemn the community effort and are making false claims about the process and about the yet-to-be-written guidelines themselves.
A “yes” vote in March does not finalize the product; it merely encourages the current effort to define our own future. This is particularly important, indeed vital at the present moment, in light of the current trend toward eliminating all zoning in Atlanta, a top-down threat which city officials may be blackmailed into accepting in fear of losing federal funds, as some observers have cautioned. Historic district protection guards against that completely unconstrained no-zone mapping which leaves open the door for outside developers free to insert any building type, scale, function, and adverse impact on our residential neighborhood.
Historic district designation will not answer every social, economic, political, and cultural issue for our diverse community, but, thoughtfully designed guidelines (that we write for ourselves) can go far to preserve what we value and allow for what we seek further to adopt. This is a grass roots effort. Do not be beguiled by those proclaiming “No one is going to tell me what I can and cannot do,” and watch out at red traffic lights for such people, as they may feel entitled to speed through the intersection in “liberated” disregard for cross traffic, bicyclists, school kids, or pedestrians, under the banner of equity and those proclaimed individual rights “not to be told what to do.” Nor, I might add, will the process cost us tens of thousands of dollars!
So what is the fake news being disseminated in order to encourage you to vote no?
1. Fake News #1: Guidelines will disallow solar panels, handicap ramps, room additions, private vegetable gardens, Christmas lights, and make-shift children’s swings hanging from a tree limb. FALSE.
Properly written guidelines can define a) that solar panels, handicap ramps, etc are allowed; and b) guidelines regarding how such may be sensitively installed. The Home Owners Association [HOA] analogy is specious; no historic district guidelines will dictate an aesthetic preference of a minority committee specifying required architectural style, allowable garden species, or only fescue grass cut in parallel lines to the street, etc. (although some HOAs do!)
2. Fake News #2: I can’t paint my house the color I want. FALSE.
Guidelines do not restrict color choice. Advice is available regarding historic color schemes, but a home owner has autonomy on this issue.
3. Fake News #3: Historic Districts limit affordable housing. FALSE.
In fact, the opposite is true; historic district designation can safeguard the affordable housing that already exists from salivating developers who see open-landscaped two-story apartment complexes in Candler Park as ripe for demolition to be replaced by 4- to 12- story apartment or condo units, built lot line to lot line without adequate (or any) parking requirement, available at 6 times the existing rental rates. In the face of no zoning, historic district designation/zoning can safeguard even existing Candler Park multi-family complexes against displacement by outside developers interested in “flipping” what is currently affordable into “denser” units no longer affordable. We see abundant evidence of that with displaced single-family houses. A larger muti-family property, currently providing affordable housing, is even more likely to flip if zoning disappears (whether within a 1-mile radius of MARTA stations or more broadly city-wide).
4. Fake News #4: Historic designation will prevent increased density, walkability, and greener commutes in Candler Park. Partly True and Partly FALSE.
If increased density means cramming 17 units into a larger historic home, as occurred at the Robert Griggs House in Inman Park during a period when the now highly desirable neighborhood became a slum, then historic designation, like housing codes, can set limits for the benefit of the “general welfare,” a fundamental principle of our Constitution. It is absurd to suggest that historic designation would limit walkability, bicycling, and “greener commutes,” as districts nationwide and abroad demonstrate. Citing such buzz words in order to promote a rejection of your neighbors’ efforts to preserve what we so value in Candler Park (these very values of a pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly community (as well as other amenities), is destructive and misleading. One might as well say historic district designation rejects motherhood and apple pie—irrelevant! Look at any historic district in Atlanta, in the US, or in Europe and the absurdity of this premise is self-evident. Many historic cores of European cities have become pedestrian only districts. Enlightened historic urban districts offer existing models for transportation/pedestrian corridors: parallel but segregated roadbeds and paths for a) rail, b) bus c) auto, d) bicycles/joggers, e) pedestrians and baby strollers, and such has enhanced the livability of the district. If every plot of land in a residential neighborhood is open to any type of development, or worse yet allows indiscriminate and unconstrained ideology to embrace “increased density” for its own sake, then we are open to our homes being displayed by concentrations of high-rise, affordable housing units (potentially maximized as superblocks): voilà, you create Co-Op City in the Bronx, not a model to emulate.
Higher density may not be as noble a concept as ideologues present it to be, and as thriving businesses in Candler Park and Little Five Points already give evidence, our neighborhood is not lacking in pedestrians or green commuters; designation can maintain and preserve our existing local shops and neighborhood business districts compatible with our needs and the scale of our neighborhood. Promoters of density on steroids (above) are encouraged to develop vacant areas of Atlanta elsewhere (of which there are many) where amenities, mixed use, mixed income, and diverse communities can be planned and designed to maximum benefit.
But the already denser historical residential neighborhoods whose values of scale, character, safe walkability, and services may not as readily accommodate multistoried towers as effectively as would a virgin site, should be protected. Residents should not be condemned if they seek to preserve historic values and traditional single-family homes without being told that climate change demands the opposite.
5. Fake News #5: Historic designation exacerbates gentrification. FALSE.
The real villain promoting gentrification is the property tax office and legislature both of whom are motivated to continue to suck more and more tax dollars from property owners on the basis of comparison with ever more expensive over-developed new construction. If you want to address gentrification, lobby the legislature to set limits on annual tax rate increases except at time of new purchase, to balance tax rate increases with millage rate decreases, and to exempt elderly homeowners, regardless of income, from the school tax portion of their tax bill after a certain [retirement] age.
6. Fake News #6: The planning process will be dominated by a handful of people who are not responsive to community wishes. Cynical and FALSE.
Anyone can participate. Set your priorities. Communicate your genuine concerns. I cannot adequately characterize the contradictory nature of an argument against a democratic process by which neighbors define their own future while others complain those willing to contribute their time on behalf of the whole community are somehow the bad guys. Hitting the buzz words of two incomes, raising young children, and/or eldercare is merely an excuse as Candler Park history shows: those new to Candler Park and Druid Hills can be forever grateful that your neighbors, a generation ago (they too were then juggling kids, eldercare, and less than stellar incomes) did not then fail to contribute selflessly against huge odds, when the “road fight” was won against GDOT, stopping the “presidential parkway” at the county line and saving Olmsted’s linear parks (a national historic landmark). Expend your energy by contributing, not complaining that you don’t have time, or by spreading fake news.
7. Fake News #7: Historic designation honors as significant the neighborhood’s painful and regrettable past. FALSE and pure nonsense.
The historic period of significance of any historic district defines the date of the building stock in the district. One need not play the race card nor suggest a particular element of the population such as LGBTQ is being dismissed on the basis of a chronological definition that merely dates 90% of the building stock in a neighborhood/historic district.
8. Fake News #8: The process is undemocratic because only homeowner’s views, not renters, are valued. FALSE.
The neighbors whom you so accuse who are engaged in this effort to designate Candler Park don’t care if Aunt Bea from Mayberry drops by for the weekend and has a good idea that can serve to protect the neighborhood from those who would erode its values (economic, social, or aesthetic). It is true that some believe that those who own their homes, condos, OR townhomes might be a bit more invested than a renter who may move out of the district next month. Home ownership is usually the largest single investment of our lives, and whether a tenant cannot afford to buy or simply prefers not to be responsible for home ownership, yet that fact does not measure up to the commitment that property owners have and why their participation may be more at the head of the line than a renter’s. However much this view may appear to be common sense to some, it will be ideologically anathema to others. In any case, renters are not second-class Candler Park citizens, but they are more usually temporary (some renting as a “first home” later to buy elsewhere; students, who rent but soon graduate taking a job elsewhere; individuals not committed to the ownership demands of building upkeep, maintenance, and repair. It is not unfair to suggest that some renters therefore may be less committed to the neighborhood than neighbors who have invested thousands of dollars in their home. And yet the door is open to renters and to owners alike to help shape the ideal guidelines for Candler Park. On the other hand, what would be tragic would be a misdirected effort to encourage a group of otherwise uninvested residents, guided by incorrect information, simply to show up for the vote with the intention (to borrow a metaphor earlier advanced) to burn the verboten book before it is read, or, indeed, before it is even written. That, I submit, is the most shameful disservice you could inflict on your neighbors. This is not a red or blue cause. It is a neighborhood effort intended to benefit the whole over the long term.
VOTE YES and volunteer to help shape this protective effort as a genuine contributing neighbor.