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SOHO President's Message
By David W. Goldberg
March/April 2024
 Photo by Marlena Krcelich |
No two ways about it, the constant barrage of negative news can be disheartening. Fortunately, not all the news is bad and, on the preservation front, SOHO has had some very good news as of late.
The San Diego City Council recently approved the Marston House $1 million exterior restoration project. The funding, provided by the State of California, is part of a $68.5 million grant for 19 different projects across the city.
As I stated when funding was first announced in late 2022, this grant couldn’t come at a better time.The Marston House hasn’t undergone regular and necessary maintenance since the 1990s, with the 2017 roof replacement being the last major repair. SOHO, in its annual updates to the city on the house’s overall condition, has requested with increasing urgency that its restoration be addressed. Several maintenance issues could undermine the site’s integrity and are potential threats to public health and safety. Not good, to say the least.
The $1 million will go a long way in resolving these problems and helping protect this historic treasure for years to come. After the restoration work is complete, the Marston House will be in the best shape it’s been in for decades, something we can all be very grateful for. Kudos to the City Council and everyone involved in pushing the ball forward.
However, in January 2024, worrisome news came from the mayor’s office regarding a comprehensive update to the recently renamed Heritage Preservation Program. The stated intent is to “modernize historic property regulations to preserve important places and streamline new home construction.” The actual intent, it seems clear, is to make it easier to build market rate and luxury housing. The mayor’s office’s press release argued that historic preservation impedes housing production, and that current protections for historic resources and development aren’t compatible. This simply isn’t true.
The city’s own Independent Budget Analyst report “Response to Request for Analysis of Potential and Designated Historical Resource Review,” issued last year (2023), clearly refuted the criticism that preservation impedes housing development, in concluding, “We believe it is unlikely that Potential and Designated Historical Resource Reviews, as only one part of a multi-disciplinary permit review process, are holding up permit issuances.”
Additionally, our analysis of the report’s data shows that less than 1% of properties subject to review resulted in historic designation. Less than one percent! When compared to the total number of properties in San Diego, the small number of homes and other buildings designated annually doesn’t even amount to a rounding error.
The city’s argument that preservation and development don’t mix also is fallacious. Increasingly, many successful and popular development projects in San Diego adaptively reuse or incorporate historic structures in meaningful and attractive ways. Moreover, SOHO has a long track record of working with developers who want to develop properties with historic resources. If there’s one thing any preservationist worth his or her salt understands, it’s that preservation needs to be financially viable to succeed.
Most surprising, shocking, actually, is that no rigorous analysis has been performed here on how historic preservation impacts affordable housing, social equity, and environmental and climate goals. For the city’s comprehensive update not to include an analysis of preservation’s benefits is perplexing, if not confounding, when other major cities have done so when reviewing their historic preservation programs. As you’ll read elsewhere in this issue, San Diego’s Neighborhood Historic Preservation Coalition is strongly urging the Historical Resources Board and the City Council to fund and commission just such a study.
Incomplete analyses and missing information don’t lead to optimal outcomes. In a city with a history of making costly mistakes and poor choices, we need to demand more of our public officials. Too much is at stake. We must all stay engaged.
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