A Time to Build

The amount of construction in Kent in the past few years has only been rivaled by the amount of demolition. 

We have seen large swaths of downtown removed to make way for new development, and we have seen old industrial properties leveled and remediated in the hopes of new well-paying industrial jobs being brought to our town. We have also seen many houses torn down, both in efforts to improve neighborhoods and to better link the university to downtown. (Not to mention the construction of a new bridge and the removal of an old one at Crain Avenue.)

Tearing down and building up have always gone together. One of the most ancient pieces of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes, even includes a phrase speaking of this:

1 There is a time for everything, 

   and a season for every activity under the heavens:

 2 a time to be born and a time to die, 

   a time to plant and a time to uproot, 

 3 a time to kill and a time to heal, 

   a time to tear down and a time to build….

Ecclesiastes 3:1-3    New International Version  Zondervan Publishing

As someone who has been involved in preserving, renovating and adapting old buildings for my entire adult life, I have a hard time with the tearing down part.  Yes, there are many good reasons to tear down buildings, but there are likewise many reasons to preserve them. The challenge is finding a balance that is appropriate.

Saving old buildings is important for many reasons, and as an architect I can rattle them off pretty readily. Some of them have to do with preserving reminders of a past time when buildings were built by hand without the benefit of power tools, heavy equipment and the like. The materials and methods used in old buildings were, by nature vernacular, in that local materials were incorporated, and building techniques fit the availability and skill of the craftspeople. 

Another reason to save old buildings is that they can be fine examples of a style of architecture, often built from pattern books by craftsman architects. Surveying the historic streets of Kent one can see a Greek Revival Period House, next to a Queen Ann Victorian, with a Craftsman Style Bungalow along side. We have a rich diversity of historic houses dating from before the Civil War up through the 1920s. With any amount of imagination on a stroll along one of our more historic streets you can see the growth of the town over time and get a sense of the lives of the people that inhabited our place, even if you haven't studied the plat and allotment maps.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for saving old buildings is ecological. Older buildings are often constructed in a more compact fashion on smaller lots facing streets that are pedestrian oriented. Their structure contains embodied energy that is wasted when the structure is demolished, and even if replaced by a modern, high-efficiency building, the loss of embodied energy means that a new building will still use more than twice the energy in its life cycle than a renovated existing building.

Of course, saving older buildings takes imagination and creativity. Using "conventional" thinking in the renovation of historic buildings usually means encasing them with plastic siding, replacing the single pane windows with plastic thermo pane glass and covering over historic finishes with new ones. These things seem reasonable until you consider that they all use petroleum that contributes to climate changing greenhouse gases, and they actually add to the cost of the renovation. Much of the reason for doing this kind of "remodeling," known to preservationists as remuddling, is because they save labor and result in what appears to be reduction in maintenance. 

One of the challenges we face in Kent is that we have a wonderful historic housing stock that has been systematically remuddled, it and is especially impacted by absentee landlords whose primary objective is to create income property instead of investing in our neighborhoods. Many fine old houses, suitable for families, have been converted into boarding houses, or neglected to the point that they are blights on our neighborhoods. So called "market" forces have meant that these houses have value not as places for families to live but as business enterprises. We need housing for collge students,  but finding a way for singles, young and older couples without kids, as well as families with children, to live in our older parts of town is important too.

Perhaps it is time for the city of Kent, local bankers, the school district and preservationists to follow the lead of many other communities and create an urban homesteading program to attract young families to restore these historic structures. Such a program would recognize that we have economic, social and environmental challenges that all can be addressed by restoring our neighborhoods. Creative use of tax abatement on improvements and other measures could go a long way to help stabilize our neighborhoods. In a day of unprecedented unemployment and underemployment, restoring existing buildings is a way for people with more time than money to invest in their own housing.  The community can help by providing technical services and workshops on building preservation as well as specialized assistance where needed. This would leverage a huge amount of creativity and is far superior to demolishing buildings that cannot afford to be rebuilt given the property values of our neighborhoods.

Government, of course, can only do so much to counteract market forces that have driven families that can afford to, to leave many of our older neighborhoods.  And yes, there may be a need to tear down some old buildings that are just too far gone to be salvaged. Nevertheless, our community spends a lot of time trying to enforce building maintenance ordinances that might be better spent working to encourage re-investment by owner occupied residents in buildings and neighborhoods that by their very nature are more sustainable than anything we can ever build new.