In 2018, the City of Pittsburgh passed a law recognizing community organizations and implementing a process to improve stakeholder participation in development activities. The new law added to an already complicated bureaucracy for such municipal boards and commissions as the Zoning Board of Adjustment, Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission. These quasi-judicial boards hold public hearings where members of the public and City officials “are allowed to give testimony concerning issues under consideration.” The new Registered Community Organization Law requires all people living in a neighborhood with a registered community organization (RCO) to hold a public meeting called a development activities meeting or DAM before they can have a case heard before one of the city’s quasi-judicial boards.

Gina and Steve Super got sucked into the new DAM system soon after it launched. In1996, they bought a historic building on Pittsburgh’s Southside. For almost 50 years prior to their purchase, the two-and-a-half-story brick building at 2106 East Carson Street had housed Gerson Brothers, a tailoring and dry cleaning business. After buying the building, Gina Super opened The Laundry Basket in the storefront space.

About two years ago, the Supers decided to make some changes. They closed the laundry business and converted the space into a retail store. At the same time, the Supers painted the building’s exterior. “All we wanted to do was freshen up the paint on the front and we replaced it with the same exact colors,” Gina Super told me in a January 2022 interview. “It wasn’t like we were changing or altering the front of the building. We repainted the identical colors.”

The paint job triggered a series of regulatory events for the Supers that started with a DAM and a required appearance before the Historic Review Commission. After the painting was done, a neighbor dropped a dime on the Supers to the City of Pittsburgh. The complaint: Super had painted the exterior of a building located in the East Carson Street Historic District without first getting a certificate of appropriateness from the Historic Review Commission.

Pittsburgh’s historic preservation law and its guidelines explicitly state what can and cannot be done to the exterior of designated historic buildings. Property owners who want to have changes, or, as is the case with the Supers, need retroactive approval for changes made without applying for a certificate of appropriateness must appear before the HRC. That is standard procedure in cities and counties throughout the United States with historic preservation laws and regulatory review regimes.

What sets Pittsburgh apart from other places with historic review commissions, historic preservation commissions, and historic preservation review boards is the DAM requirement. It imposes added costs and bureaucratic red tape for everything from painting a building’s exterior to replacing windows to the demolition of an old building.

It Was Useless

The Registered Community Organizations Law specifies how DAMs are to be conducted:

The Department of City Planning shall require an applicant to coordinate with the applicable RCO to schedule a time, date and place of a public meeting to discuss the applicant’s proposal. That meeting, in which the applicant must participate, must take place at least thirty (30) days prior to the first public hearing. The applicant shall then notify the Department of City Planning and neighborhood planner of the time, date and place of the public meeting. If there are two or more RCO’s whose registered boundaries include the applicant’s property, the Department of City Planning shall schedule a time, date and place of a public meeting to discuss the applicant’s proposal with the applicable RCO’s. That meeting, in which the applicant must participate, must take place at least thirty (30) days prior to the first public hearing.

I’ve gotta wonder if all of the city’s civic watchdogs and historic preservation advocacy groups were asleep when this law was proposed and subsequently enacted. Seriously? A DAM and then hearings for repainting a building facade or installing new windows?

Pittsburgh’s DAM law doesn’t discriminate on the basis of scale or scope: anyone in a RCO neighborhood with business before the HRC must hold a DAM. That includes actions like nominating a single building as a historic landmark. For example, residents in East Liberty, the Hill District, the Southside, and parts of Oakland are forced to hold public meetings ahead of legally required public meetings and hearings before the HRC. It is an insane and costly redundancy.

The Supers held their DAM virtually in September 2020 and their hearing before the HRC took place two months later. According to the Application for a Certificate of Appropriateness the Supers filed on July 27, 2020, their project involved scraping old paint and repainting damaged wood.

The Supers got their wrist slapped during their November 4, 2020, HRC hearing. The hearing minutes recorded that the the local community organization commended the Supers for their restoration efforts and it ultimately conceded, “they would have preferred that they would have considered removing the paint, but they do not have objections to the work as completed.”

The HRC agreed and voted unanimously to approve the certificate of appropriateness.

“We made zero alterations other than scraping and painting. And they nabbed us in that process because we didn’t follow their procedures,” Super said. “It was useless.”

The Supers’ case was one of 38 DAMs held for Historic Review Commission cases between March 2019 and December 2021. The projects include sign installations, “building renovations,” demolitions, window replacements, and one other painting project besides the Supers’.

Other DAM’s held for Historic Review Commission cases include one for a home in the Schenley Farms Historic District. In April 2019, the owners of a home on Parkman Avenue held a DAM at the Adult Career Center in Oakland. Forty people attended, including city staff, community organization leaders, consultants for the owner, and neighbors. City staff produces a summary of each DAM. For the Parkman Avenue project, staff replied to the form’s question, “How did the meeting inform the community about the development project?” Staff replied:

Described the window products, materials, energy efficiency benefits, and that they were replicating the exact look of the existing windows on a home within the Schenley Farms Historic District. They will need to get approvals from the Historic Resource Commission and were told a DAM was required.

One participant asked, “Why do you need to go to HRC? The applicants replied, “Windows look identical to historic ones, but they are a single piece with removable mullions.”

Another participant repeated the question about why the owners were holding the meeting. “Repeat that they need to go to HRC and so they were told they needed to have a DAM.”

After the DAM, the owners attended two HRC hearings, one in May 2019 and another the following month. At the June 2019 HRC hearing, commissioners gave the owners specific requirements for the replacement windows and voted unanimously to approve the certificate of appropriateness.

A Case of the Left Hand Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing

Pittsburgh’s DAM Law appears to have been enacted in a silo. There is nothing in the City’s historic preservation law nor its applications for certificates of appropriateness and historic designation explaining the added layer of bureaucratic review. The Historic Review Commission’s nomination form has a checklist for actions required before filing the application and a DAM isn’t one of them. The HRC’s “Rules and Procedures” haven’t been updated since 2013.

Historic preservation has lots of critics. Opponents claim that local historic preservation laws like Pittsburgh’s infringe on property owners’ rights and that they place outrageous regulatory burdens on property owners. Many of the claims are urban legends involving the “paint police” and other disinformation meant to gin up opposition to preservation. In Pittsburgh’s case, the criticisms are well deserved. There really is a “paint police” and the regulatory burdens imposed by DAMs are extreme.

Pittsburgh’s Registered Community Organization Law one size fits all approach might have been well intentioned — after all, public engagement and involvement are essential to civic affairs. But, the law goes too far by lumping together significant changes exterior changes likely to affect neighborhood character, etc., (i.e., building demolition) with minor maintenance and repairs like painting. It’s off the charts insane requiring DAMs for proposals to designate individual buildings as historic landmarks. There’s a case for added stakeholder involvement when historic districts involving many buildings and people, but that’s debatable considering the many public meetings and hearings required before a proposed designation even makes its way to City Council for a final legislative decision.

It’s a DAM Shame

As I see it, the City of Pittsburgh should amend its Registered Community Organization Law to make it more fair by recognizing that not all projects impose the same external effects on people in a community. For the wealthier residents of upscale neighborhoods with historic districts, additional regulatory requirements are simply an inconvenience. For the city’s less privileged residents, complying with the DAM law and with the City’s historic preservation law could have catastrophic economic consequences.

This is the second post in a series documenting the City of Pittsburgh’s flawed historic preservation law and its implementation. The first post calls for repealing the historic preservation law. That would be a solution to the Registered Community Organization Law problems but it wouldn’t provide relief for residents appearing before the Art Commission and other boards.

© 2022 D.S. Rotenstein

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