Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Independence

A philosophical point or two to keep in mind.

There are two ways in which individuals can deal with one another. By force, or by consent.

Preservation Chicago doesn't want to persuade you, or offer you incentives to preserve your homes in a matter that suits their aesthetic sensibilities. They want to force you to surrender your homes to city bureaucrats, who in turn will force you to do whatever THEY want you to do and what they think is appropriate for a home's facade. You don't have to answer to them now, why would you give tham that power over you without getting a major benefit in return? Why do they get to essentially impose a "tax" on you merely because you bought a house that is old?

One of the offenses the founders of this country had against the King of England as stated in the Declaration of Independence was that:

"He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance...."

"For imposing taxes on us without our consent..."

"In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people...."

"We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

Oh, and don't forget that final clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

Landmarking is a supposedly public benefit. What is your just compensation?

And just to round out the discussion, here is a clause from the Fourteenth Amendment:

"...nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

If you are deprived of property rights merely based on Aldermanic whim (City will landmark you if your alderman wants it; they will not landmark you if she doesn't), I don't care how many forums the city sponsors to let you vent your frustrations on the record; that is not really "due process" of law.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Beware those who disparage you for asking "What's in it for me?"

To me, it is a pretty simple thing. Your property comes with a bundle of rights. You paid for that full bundle of rights. Landmarking takes away a piece of those rights. What value are you getting in response to that???

You'll hear people say that sensible urban planning is essential to our civilization, and that landmarking is necessary part of that planning.

Well, that's a nice social-utopian statement, but ask yourself: who decides what is "sensible"? Who decides what is "essential"? Is it a city bureaucrat, or neighborhood association, or anyone else claiming to speak on behalf of "the public"? Just remember -- it isn't you. And when you are paying the mortgage, maintaining the property, writing the check for homeowner's insurance, those types aren't going to be there to help you.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

When eminent domain gets really bad

Consider this to be the extreme end of what happens when individuals are not considered by the government to have any property rights (or personal human dignity deserving rights, for that matter).

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18535_Massacre_in_China&only

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Top five problems with landmarking

Well, I can come up with more than five, and some are of more of a fundamental "this is America philosophical freedom personal liberty" type, but here are the ones that the landmarks people definitely will NOT tell you.

1) If you are landmarked, your homeowner's insurance costs will go up. Here's the situation. When you insure your home, the insurance company has mathematical tables that it relies on to estimate the likelihood of loss, and has estimates on what it would cost to repair/replace a house of equivalent dimensions using standard building materials. That standard insurance policy DOES NOT pay for repair/replacement to historic guidelines, which is what landmarking imposes. If you want that kind of coverage, you either need to get it via having a special policy rider written to cover historic preservation (which costs beaucoup bucks), or by overinsuring your home generally (i.e., if you have a $500K policy, you should at least double it to be a $1M policy).

State Farm, for example, has the following language in its homeowner's insurance policies:

"2. We will not pay for:...

(c) any increased cost to repair, rebuild or construct the building caused by enforcement of building, zoning or land use ordinance or law."

Guess what? Landmarking is a "land use ordinance" that increases the cost to repair, rebuild or construct a building.

To give an example of the difference between what a standard insurance policy would cover versus what you would need for historical coverage, try this. Assume you have a house with a front porch. During a storm, a tree limb falls off and crashes down, taking down part of your porch roof, railings, and maybe even takes out a part of the window. Standard insurance would cover ripping out what is damaged, and rebuilding with stock materials (i.e., what you get from Home Depot on the higher end). But if you are in a landmarked district, you can't get something "off the rack." Rather, you have to salvage and reuse as much of the original materials as possible; repair the original materials that are broken using historical methods; and if you MUST replace something, your replacement parts have to conform to historic specifications and materials, as set forth in the US Department of the Interior guidelines. What that means is that if your porch railings had a hand-turned post topper, you have to have a new version made by hand, and made to look identical to the original. Ditto for windows. STANDARD HOMEOWNER'S INSURANCE DOES NOT COVER THESE EXTRA COSTS. If your insurance company says that it would cost you $10 to fix a broken porch balustrade using stock wood you could pick up at Home Depot, but Landmarks commission says you have to have a new balustrade custom-milled using a hand lathe, at a cost of $200, YOU eat that $190 cost differential; you can't get your insurance company to pay for it under a standard policy, because they do not pay for increased costs associated with complying with local land use ordinances.

2) If you are landmarked, you are surrendering control of your home's exterior to the City's landmarks department and your local neighborhood association for design review. Oh, and the landmarks folks always say that they are interested in your facade. Well, there are two problems with that. First, people have very different interpretations of "facade." City landmarks tends to view facade as "any part of your house, porch, roof or garage that can be seen anywhere from the street, sidewalk, neighbor's yard, public alley, or any other public access route." It is not merely the side of your house that faces the street. Second, let's be realistic: we live in Chicago, city of scratch my back I'll scratch yours. The second you surrender control of your front, you effectively surrender control of the back, because once you need a permit for something to get done on the front, a city bureaucrat can "suggest" that if you make a change to your back, your permit will be approved tomorrow. If you disagree, well, maybe that permit application will sit on my desk for six months while he thinks about the facade impact. (Or forces you to go get a lawyer, or complain to your Alderman). If you are not landmarked at all, he has no power or control over you. Which would you choose?

This is why we should always be very, very careful of surrendering even a portion of our property rights to anyone else. Particularly people who we don't even elect.

Oh, and when you are landmarked, neighborhood associations get a say in the process too -- so not only do you have to convince Landmarks department, your alderman, and the buildings department that your home renovations should be done, but now your neighborhood association gets design review too. And for those talking about preserving the character of the neighborhood, think about what it does to neighborhood character when the members of the neighborhood committees having the power of design review are called the "neighborhood nazis," as in Old Town.

It may make you wonder, who is paying the mortgage and the taxes here? But I digress.

3) Landmarking has no impact on your property taxes. It is a persistent myth the pro-landmarks people use, but we'll debunk it again. Landmark designation will NOT freeze your property taxes. There is already in place a State of Illinois program where, if 25% of your home's value is put into historical renovations, in accordance with their guidelines and approval process, your property taxes can be frozen for a period of 8 years, with a successive steps back up to market levels for the final four years. You do NOT have to be landmarked under the City of Chicago to take advantage of this program AT ALL.

4) Landmarking under the City of Chicago ordinance takes away one of the few economic benefits to historic preservation -- a historic facade easement donation. This involves a slgihtly complicated tax issue, so if you want more information about this, DO NOT rely on this post alone, and please, please, please contact a qualified tax attorney who can give you the details, rules and requirements. The gist is this. The IRS allows owners of historic properties to donate a permanent easement on the facade of their home to a preservation council (i.e., Preservation Council of Illinois). The devaluation (or portion thereof) in the value of your home as a result of this easement can be used as a charitable deduction against your income taxes. In essence, the IRS lets you deduct the loss of your home value for the "charitable gift" of a part of your property (facade of your home) you made to the preservation society. Once you are subject to City landmark ordinance, which controls the facade of your home and obligates you to preserve it, you can't take that deduction anymore, because the landmarking ordinance already transferred from you to the City the property rights associated with control over the facade of your home.

5) Lagging property values over time. This is a biggie. In Lincoln Park, we had a study prepared in which we compared the relative appreciation rates over time of the Lincoln Park Sheffield neighborhood (the area that Vi Daley wanted to landmark) with the relative appreciation rates of the homes in the Mid-North district (same distance north as Lincoln Park Sheffield district, but closer over to the lake), which has been landmarked for the past 20 years. We found that the average appreciation rate in Mid-North was on the order of 15% per year. In Lincoln Park's Sheffield district, it was 20% per year. Now, granted, both areas appreciated in value over that 20 year period (I should hope so!). But when you consider that one area is oupacing the other by 5% each year, and start compounding that difference over home values each year, that is some serious lost appreciation opportunities. A 25% difference in value on homesites valued at over a million dollars ... you can do the math. Ask yourself how the benefits of landmarking (if there are any) can even come close to compensating you for that lost value.

Why Andersonville, why now?

It is the same pattern repeated again and again.

There is an organization in Chicago that calls themselves "Preservation Chicago." Though they claim to have an interest in presreving properties, they don't do any of that sort of hard work themselves. Rather, they try to impose City of Chicago landmark designation on all of the neighborhoods that they like, and really don't care what the people affected by the process want or think.

Here is an overview of their modus operandi.

Preservation Chicago, usually in the form of their president, Jonathan Fine, goes to meetings of the local neighborhood association and asks if they would allow Presrevation Chicago to make a presentation on the benefits of landmarking. With all good intentions (because it never hurts to listen, right?) the neighborhood association lets them do a presentation. It is (perhaps unsurprisingly) misleading and biased in favor of landmarking. They use fear tactics that a local neighborhood is on the verge of destruction from evil tearing-down developers, with ugly "McMansions" soon to take their place. (They are currently using a Lincoln Park block on Burling street to illustrate this point, but fail to disclose that this particular block was originally blighted and run down compared to the rest of the neighborhood, and given a special zoning exemption, which caused turnover of the dilapidated housing stock to be replaced with bigger buildings that could never have been built but-for the special zoning exemption. Proof positive that it is zoning, not landmarking, that has the most impact on the character of your neighborhood. Oh, it also turns out that in the heart of Lincoln Park (Willow to Belden, Halsted to Sheffield), the area Preservation Chicago wanted to get their hands on, less than 1% of the properties in the area had whole-house demolition permits issued by the city within the last five years, and for the most part the neighborhood was happy to see houses like the 1950s wood frame and another one covered with asbestos shingles get replaced with newer brick and stone single family homes).

Preservation Chicago tried this last year with us in Lincoln Park's Armitage/Sheffield district. They pushed it through on West Town (and the West Town property owners have seen property values that were appreciating rapidly suddenly freeze, so much so that people are now advertise their properties for sale as "non-landmarked"). They're starting this process in Bucktown. Ditto for anyone with a greystone in Lakeview. And now they've set their sights on Andersonville.

Preservation Chicago holds out landmarking as the neighborhood holy grail, but never tells people about what landmarking really does to your property, never explains what happens once the process gets underway with the city bureaucracy and never informs people about the very real downsides.

Why don't they pain the whole picture? Because once people realize what is actually being taken away from them, they reject the idea.

So what Preservation Chicago tries to do is get the neighborhood association reps and the alderman sufficiently invested in the process that they won't want to look back. And, they don't want to give people opposing the idea to get organized. And they definitely want to make sure that the Alderman does not hear that there is opposition to the idea. They want to keep her in the dark as well as to what people really think, because landmarking, unlike aldermen, is forever.

Here is what we know about what they have done so far in Andersonville.

Preservation Chicago made their initial presentation meeting to the Lakewood Balmoral Residents Council in July of this past year. They did a second presentation in November, imported their own members to the meeting, and took a "straw poll" saying that everyone was in favor of landmarking. They refused to answer people's questions. It was then reported to the LBRC that "everyone" was in favor of landmarking a district in Andersonville.

The proposed boundaries? Everything from Foster (south side) to Bryn Mawr (north side), and from Magnolia (both sides) to Wayne (both sides).

Now LBRC, thinking that "everyone" wants landmarking, has established a committee to investigate landmarking, and will sponsor "coffees" on a block-by-block basis where Preservation Chicago will tightly control the meeting, who gets to speak, and who gets to attend. Having controlled the meeting and the information flow, Preservation Chicago and LBRC will then report back that having consulted "everyone" living on the blocks in question, landmarking is a good idea. They'll get the Alderman to sign off on the deal, and then you are effectively landmarked.

You may be asking at this point, Don't I get a vote? Theoretically, yes. In reality, no. Here is why.

The landmarks bureaucracy has NEVER, EVER rejected a request for landmark districting that is requested by a local alderman. Under the Landmarks ordinance, the city is obligated to send out ballots to the property taxpayers and see if they want it or not. But, the Landmarks ordinance specifically states that even if a majority of property owners vote AGAINST landmarking their properties, the Landmarks Commission (9 people appointed by the mayor, no-one is elected; Senator Obama's wife is one of them) can landmark you anyway. Unless the entire City Council votes within a year to overturn their decision, you are permanently landmarked.

So what do you need to do? Get involved with the process NOW. We will be collecting information here to pass on to homeowners about landmarking in Andersonville. We will let you know when neighborhood association meetings are, how to contact your Alderman, and what you can do to let your neighbors know. You can email us at vocalneighbors@hotmail.com with any questions that you may have as well.

To be blunt: if your Alderman recommends you for landmarking, you will be landmarked. If she does not propose a district for landmarking, your property rights are safe.

To be fair: it does not appear that your Alderman is pushing for this herself, and is willing to listen to what the people in her neighborhood actually want, which puts you in a far better position than the one we were in when Vi Daley wanted to landmark Lincoln Park, and certainly much better than the poor people in West Town who got screwed over by Manny Flores.

Please use this site to educate yourself as to who your alderman is, when meetings impacting your block will be taking place, and what you can do to protect your property rights. The post prior to this one gives your Alderman's info; the next one will give some of our top reasons why landmarking property under the current ordinance will make it harder, not easier, for you to maintain your home in your neighborhood.

All the best,
Dee Grant

Friday, December 02, 2005

Andersonville

Now Preservation Chicago has targeted the Lakewood-Balmoral Historic District in Andersonville for landmarking. It seems that Preservation Chicago has convinced the board of the Lakewood Balmoral Residents Council (LBRC) that neighborhood tear-downs are imminent and that landmarking is the only way to stop that from happening. Of course tear-downs are not happening or even threatened in the neighborhood. In fact, a number of beautiful renovations have been completed or are underway. But it seems that renovating historic properties by individual neighbors to suit a property owner's taste is not enough for Preservation Chicago. Preservation Chicago would rather impose THEIR views and a city bureaucrat's views on what your property should look like and how it should be restored. Preservation Chiago is again calling the shots and running the so-called "informal coffees" process seeking community input on this. Naturally, Preservation Chicago has not found a single person opposed to landmarking -- of course, they won't even allow anyone opposed to landmarking to explain the downsides. Area homeowners report that the process is being tightly controlled and that the information Preservation Chicago provides is inaccurate, misleading and biased and that any disagreement or attempts to present balanced information are being stifled by the LBRC board.

To express your concerns about the biased process set up by Preservation Chicago and the LBRC board and to voice your opposition to ceding your private property rights to the Chicago Landmarks Commission, contact:

Alderman Mary Ann Smith
5533 N. Broadway
Chicago, IL 60640
Phone: (773) 784-5277
Fax: (773) 784-5033
info@masmith48.org

The point person on this in her office is Marge, who can be reached at 773-293-8412.