Editorial: The economic power of historic preservation

From the Savannah Morning News was this recent editorial about a study linking historic preservation to economic development. Donovan Rypkema is an award winner in the field and was brought to Savannah, Georgia to explore the link historic neighborhoods play in the economic activity and lives of the general area. He found that its role was "substantial."

His conclusions are simple:

    Savannah, he said, is an international example of local business development through preservation rather than instead of preservation.
It’s time, Rypkema said, to permanently eliminate the false choice of we have to choose either to have economic development or historic preservation.
     “In Savannah, you’re doing the former by using the latter,” Rypkema said.
     Rypkema’s findings are hardly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention for the last few decades, but they serve as useful reminders that ideas and approaches long advocated by a variety of organizations within the community are on track.

Earlier on the editorial points out the following:

     Did anything in the results surprise Rypkema?
     The answer was yes. He found that what he called “the extraordinary attractiveness of the historic districts to both small businesses and start-up businesses was at a magnitude that was quite surprising.”
     One element of the attractiveness of the city’s historic district, he said, is that they’re not museums frozen in time but, rather, are dynamic neighborhoods.
     Evidence of that, he said, is the fact that over the last 15 years more money has been invested in new construction in the neighborhoods than in rehabilitation.

If you haven't been to Savannah and walked through their downtown and surrounding areas, you really need to. The city plan is laid on a grid, but with the addition of "squares" which serve as urban oasis(es) and help define the character of individual neighborhoods. There isn't a parallel in Lake Worth like the "squares", but there is the abundance of public land that we have on the water. That really has always been a defining characteristic of Lake Worth. We have the beach, the golf course, north and south Bryant Park, the county's Lake Osborne and adjacent John Prince Park. All attractive elements that our city's leaders of past generations attempted to make the most of.

Anyway, back to historic preservation, more and more I am referring to the concept of historic evolution as it relates to preservation. Neighborhoods and cities are not static things or museum pieces that exist in a vacuum. The natural order of life is change and finding the balance between historic preservation and that innate constant of change is the challenge that we face here, and in other historic communities around the nation.