AUSTIN, Texas — In January, the city of Austin is changing its historic preservation plan, expanding protections for the places that make Austin “Austin.”
The city council adopted the Equity-Based Preservation Plan last Thursday, replacing one that hasn’t been updated since 1981.
“We can’t freeze Austin in time, but we can preserve and capture the ethos of what makes our city so special. I think it’s a milestone moment for us to be adopting this equity-based historic preservation plan with a corresponding implementation plan,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes said at the meeting.
Based on 107 recommendations, city leaders will look at expanding the criteria to what makes a historic landmark significant, like cultural heritage, and making preservation more equitable, inclusive and sustainable.
“The idea for it is at least five or six years old,” said Ben Haimsath, chairman of Austin’s Historic Landmarks Commission. “We recognized as commissioners that the plan and all the tools we were working with were dated.”
Haimsath said the historic preservation movement hit the nation in the 1960s, and up until the ’80s, Austin was successful in preserving many historic buildings that were under threat of being lost due to the changing landscape.
“So, many of those landmarks are concentrated in the central part of town, and many of them, in fact, represent families that were very wealthy and powerful at the time,” he said. “But we overlooked a lot of Austin.”
He said the Green & White Grocery, which was built in the 1920s and is still in operation in East Austin, is a perfect example of that neglect. Haimsath said it should have been made a historic landmark long ago.
“This is one of the landmarks that we have, on our own with the current tools, been trying very hard to address these overlooked communities, the Hispanic community in particular on the East Side,” Haimsath said.
He said preservation efforts weren’t focused on areas with large minority populations at the time, even though they fit historic preservation criteria.
“Not only is it a distinctive building; it’s very close to what it looked like back in the 1920s when it was built,” he said. “But the same family also has run this business for a long time. And we don’t have right now in our toolbox a way of recognizing legacy businesses as a criteria.”
In the past few years, he said half of all historic designations have been given to landmarks on the East Side and in underserved communities, but it’s still only a fraction of the places that still exist.
According to Preservation Austin, only 16% of Austin’s historic landmarks and districts have known associations with communities of color. Now, the organization says more buildings and landmarks are being lost.
“We’re having these older homes get demolished, and so we want stronger mechanisms to ensure that we are doing what we can to preserve, to make it easier for families to preserve their homes,” Council Member Fuentes said.
The plan aims to recognize Austin’s cultural heritage and will focus preservation efforts on displacement prevention and environmental sustainability, which includes expanding criteria to what merits preservation and expanding historic landmark tax breaks that help pay to maintain the property.
“If we don’t pass them on, the future generation will be ignorant of this history,” Haimsath said. “It’s our duty to say these are important enough, we value them enough.”
The city plans to implement these plans over the next 10 years.