environment. Adopting a historic district ordinance
also provides actual protection from inappropriate change for a
community’s historic resources and helps to preserve its
sense of place. An ordinance establishes a formal body to
review proposed work within the district. Their review and
public discussion of proposed actions within the district can
help to encourage better design in a community while helping
owners make changes to their property without negative impacts
on individual buildings or the district as a whole. The
enactment of a historic district ordinance helps to connect
residents and visitors alike to the district’s history
and architecture by focusing attention on the district through
public meetings, specially designed signs or interpretive
markers, publications, or tours, for example.
Communities reap other benefits from
enacting historic district ordinances. Historic buildings are
rehabilitated or restored and reused, rather than demolished, benefitting
the physical environment and protecting the natural environment
from demolition debris consigned to landfills. In communities protected
with a local historic district ordinance, private investment in
the district is stimulated and property values are protected.
Investors recognize that improvements made to their historic
buildings will be protected from demolition, inappropriate
change, or encroachment by new development within the district.
Locally protected historic districts can attract new
businesses, residents and travelers who value the sense of
place created when historic features of a community are
preserved. Local historic district ordinances usually protect human-scale
buildings and pedestrian-friendly
streets, enhancing a neighborhood’s
health and vitality, contributing to its quality of life and
fostering community pride.
HISTORY OF LOCAL PROTECTION EFFORTS
Alexandria was the first Virginia
community to adopt a local historic district ordinance in 1946,
following the examples of Charleston, SC (1931) and New Orleans
(1936). The constitutionality of such preservation ordinances
was upheld in 1978 in the US Supreme Court case Penn Central
vs. City of New York. The ruling recognized historic
preservation as a valid public purpose and upheld the
regulation of historic properties under a preservation
ordinance as the appropriate means of accomplishing that public
purpose.
The earliest historic district ordinances,
like the earliest preservation efforts, sought to freeze in
time a collection of resources. Later, recovering from losses
created by well meant programs of urban renewal, citizens and
local governments realized that preservation of intact historic
neighborhoods could be a catalyst for revitalization at first
through direct public funding and later through leveraged
private investment.
LOCAL HISTORIC
DISTRICT ORDINANCE
DISTRICT ORDINANCE
Close to 75 local governments in Virginia
have a local historic district ordinance in place, according to
records of the Virginia Local Preservation Reference Collection
at the University of Mary Washington’s Center for
Historic Preservation. These local historic district ordinances
are “laid over” the underlying zoning and require
the review of
