Last week the Pittsburgh Planning Commission agreed with a recommendation forwarded to it by the city’s Historic Review Commission that an 1840s house in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood is eligible for designation as a city historic landmark.

The Ewalt Mansion is a two-story brick Greek Revival home built by an early Pittsburgh resident, Samuel Ewalt. According to historic preservationists, the building is historically significant for its architecture and for its association with important people and events in Pittsburgh’s history.

Lawrenceville is one of Pittsburgh’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Change and displacement are happening so quickly in the neighborhood that in 2019 the City of Pittsburgh passed a new inclusive zoning law. The law is an experiment and temporary — it expires 18 months from its enactment — and it only covers large developers building at least 20 rental units. The pilot program’s goal is to preserve affordable housing. Affordable housing advocates hailed the new law, which only applies to Lawrenceville.

The Ewalt Mansion’s owners inherited the property and they have been unable to afford its upkeep. At the March Planning Commission hearing, the owners and their attorney described years of deferred maintenance contributing to what they believe is irreversible structural damage to the building.

Historic preservation advocates described the building as one of Pittsburgh most historically significant properties. The owners say it’s a dangerous hazard that could collapse and hurt nearby homes and people.

The drama that played out in the Planning Commission’s downtown hearing room came straight out of shopworn a script historic preservationists and their opponents have used for decades. One side firmly believes that a building is an irreplaceable treasure and the other thinks that it’s a money pit and a death trap.

The Ewalt Mansion’s owners have found a buyer for the property, a developer who wants to demolish it and replace the house with five market-rate townhouses. Though gentrification wasn’t part of the historic designation discussion during the March 10, 2020 hearing, it wasn’t far from the surface.

I attended the hearing because at the time I was working on an article about equity in historic preservation in Pittsburgh. The Ewalt Mansion case would have provided a solid foundation to discuss the barriers to participation in historic designation in the city and the biases that contribute to which properties are designated as city landmarks and which ones are not.

The publication’s editors killed the story after deciding that it was something that they should have assigned to a staff reporter, not an area expert.

Meanwhile, I had done the legwork to write about the Ewalt Mansion and how the historic preservation case fits into a larger context of gentrification in Pittsburgh. There are a few articles that I’ll be able to write that speak to the larger issues of economic and racial bias in the city’s historic preservation community and I’ll be moving forward on those. For me, the Ewalt Mansion is a dead end — except for one thing that I couldn’t shake after my original article idea was killed.

Before the hearing began I was standing in the lobby of 200 Ross Street, the building that houses the Pittsburgh Planning Department, waiting for the hearing room to open. I was joined by someone who was there on behalf of the property owners. We began speaking and I asked permission to run a recorder after explaining why I was there. The person consented.

We spoke about the building and its history. And then the conversation turned to what will happen to the property if the planned sale to the developer occurs. I asked, “How does this fit with the city’s planning goals and existing plans?”

The individual replied, “Part of their planning goals is to bring new people into the city. They have all those restaurants. If we have five units, I don’t know, I mean people coming in. Imagine the property taxes.”

Right. Imagine the property taxes. Significant property tax increases are a leading factor in displacement. I then asked if the property’s value will increase once the new units are built.

The reply: “It will jump up considerably.”

My next question was whether any of the new units would be affordable or workforce housing? They won’t be.

I then brought up the G-word: “Lawrenceville is one of the most quickly gentrifying neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh. How will this new conversion of the property contribute to gentrification in Lawrenceville and the city at large?”

“It will attract, you know, gentrify-type people,” the person said, who would patronize the new restaurants and bars opening in the neighborhood. “Before it was bars and taverns, you really wouldn’t want to walk down the street. Now you want to go there, park, and spend the day there.”

And then the jaw-dropper: “So it will, I don’t know, add the right kind of people.” To be fair, the person quickly realized how the statement might sound and added, “Not that there isn’t any kind of right kind of people are there because I don’t think there are.”

I wanted to ask, but didn’t: who used to walk there and who wouldn’t want to walk down the street?

The right kind of people. That is what gentrification is: converting space for use by wealthier people, the right kind of people, by displacing the wrong kind of people, the less wealthy folks who live, work, play, and worship in urban and suburban neighborhoods all across the planet.

In this worldview, the poor and people of color, they’re the wrong kind of people. Middle-class consumers, they are the right kind of people.

Gentrification and displacement remained invisible on the other side of the case. The parties who nominated the property for historic designation did so through a neighborhood community group, the Lawrenceville Stakeholders. The volunteer group was founded in 2003. According to its website, they are “dedicated to promoting the revitalization and development of Lawrenceville’s residential sector.” The individuals promoting the landmark designation include three architects and an individual whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a “real estate professional.”

This group of white middle-class residents filed the landmark nomination after learning that there was a plan in the works to demolish the building. Testimony at the hearing included statements that the group had considered nominating the building previously but those efforts ended when it appeared that there was no imminent threat to the property. The preservation advocates even indicated that they were willing work with the current owners to find an owner who could rehabilitate it or they would be offer to buy the property — sometime in the future.

On its surface, the Ewalt Mansion case appears to be a classic NIMBY response to proposed neighborhood change: using historic preservation laws as a hammer to prevent the changes. Sometimes these cases have no merit because the properties do not meet the legal criteria for the designation that would prevent demolition. Other times, the buildings do meet the legal criteria because they are historically and/or architecturally significant. The preservationists who nominated the Ewalt Mansion made a strong, legally defensible case under Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law and the Historic Review Commission and Planning Commission agreed.

So I wonder if Pittsburgh’s pilot inclusive zoning plan will make a difference in Lawrenceville. And where do buildings and cases like the Ewalt Mansion fit in how the city addresses its affordable housing shortage and displacement? If the Ewalt Mansion is ultimately designated a city landmark by the Pittsburgh City Council, will a solution emerge that includes a new life for the building, a new life that embraces affordability, conservation, and equitable community development? Or will the building’s new life embrace an outdated vision of historic preservation, one that creates lifeless museum artifacts and that attracts “the right kind of people?”

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

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