4.0 HPSR 12-08-2005 - Laserfiche WebLink

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9 benefits of economic globalization while simultaneously mitigating the negative impacts of cultural globalization. So there are some ways that heritage conservation contributes to sustainable development through environmental responsibility and through economic responsibility. But I saved the third area -cultural and social responsibility -for last, because in the long run it may well be the most important. First, housing. In the United States today we are facing a crisis in housing. All kinds of solutions -most of them very expensive -are being proposed. But the most obvious is barely on the radar screen -quit tearing down older and historic housing. Houses built before 1950 disproportionately are home to people of modest resources -the vast majority without any subsidy or public intervention of any kind. So you take these two facts -there is an affordable housing crisis and older housing is providing affordable housing and one would think, "Well, then, a high priority must be saving that housing stock." Alas, not so. In the last three decades of the 20th century we lost from our national inventory of older and historic homes 6.3 million year-round housing units! Over 80 percent of those units were single-family residences. Now a few of those burned down or were lost to natural disasters. But the vast majority of them were consciously torn down -were thrown away as being valueless. And today millions of American families are paying the cost by paying for housing they cannot afford. Certainly not every one of those houses could or should have been saved. But if even half were retained instead of razed, the picture today would be much different for the millions of Americans inadequately or unaffordably housed. For the last thirty years, every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year we have lost 577 older and historic houses. For our most historic houses -those built before 1920 - in just the decade of the 1990s 772,000 housing units were lost from our built national heritage. But when there are policies to conserve older housing stock, we are meeting the social responsibility of sustainable development. But at least as important as the affordability issue is the issue of economic integration. America is a very diverse country -racially, ethnically, educationally, economically. But on the neighborhood level our neighborhoods are not diverse at all. The vast majority of neighborhoods are all white or all black, all rich or all poor. But the exception -virtually everywhere I've looked in America - is in historic districts. There rich and poor, Asian and Hispanic, college educated and high school drop out, live in immediate proximity, are neighbors in the truest sense of the work. That is economic integration and sustainable cities are going to need it. Earlier I mentioned the labor intensity of historic preservation and the jobs it creates as part of the economic component of sustainable development But I want to mention it again in the social context. Those aren't just jobs. They are good, well-paying jobs,