Planning Commission gets its first look at Equity-Based Preservation Plan

With the draft Equity-Based Preservation Plan now available for public review, city boards and commissions are getting briefed on the document that includes over 100 recommendations for preserving the highs and lows of Austin’s history.

The Planning Commission, which will be voting on the plan this fall, heard an overview of the draft at its March 12 meeting.

“We’re updating a plan that hasn’t been changed since the 1980s,” said Ben Heimsath, an architect and chair of the Historic Landmark Commission. Hundreds of hours in the making, the draft document is the product of a Preservation Plan working group, which is now in its third year of exploring Austin’s history and how to preserve it. The group is made up of individuals from over 19 ZIP codes, a third of whom are renters, Heimsath said. An overarching goal of the group’s work is for preservation to serve all of Austin, including underrepresented and underserved communities.

Cara Bertron of the city’s Historic Preservation Office touched on three themes that summarize the plan, including what gets preserved, who preserves and how preservation is done. “The idea behind (what we preserve) is really to think broadly to recognize the full, complicated history of Austin through better listening to community members about what’s important, and then sharing that back through interpretation,” she said.

On the theme of who preserves, preservation advocates want to see more of a big-tent initiative put forward to get more people involved in preservation projects and in participating in city processes such as the Historic Landmark Commission and other boards and commissions.

The third theme of how preservation is done centers on what Bertron called the “nuts and bolts” of the city’s current review and designation processes. “The idea behind it is to be more strategic and effective with limited staff time and resources,” she said. One goal in particular is to have preservation serve all of Austin. “We’re not aiming to designate the entire city, but rather to have historic properties that reflect the city’s full history,” Bertron said.

Commissioner Alberta Phillips shared that when she researched the number of designated properties about six years ago, roughly 600 properties were landmarked historic. Of that 600, just 50 properties were associated with African American history and culture and “barely two dozen” with Latino culture and history. “I see this plan very optimistically as a way of getting at that deep inequity,” she said, later adding that implementation of the plan is “an urgent matter because so much has been bulldozed in communities of color and underserved communities.”

Given Austin’s problematic past relating to certain properties or other types of infrastructure, Commissioner Awais Azhar asked if there was any guidance in the plan on how to address those areas.

“We’ve struggled on this commission with this question; that’s why it’s sort of top of mind for me. We do have structures that occasionally come to us that might have historical significance in different ways, or architectural significance, but might have a troubled past. Is there a way for us to communicate to the community that yes, there’s some degree of worthiness of preserving the structure, but there’s challenges in our history?”

While the draft plan doesn’t currently include recommendations on that score, Bertron said she would bring it to the working group’s attention for further review.

Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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