I recently read a wonderful article on culturemap.com by Ralph Bivins about watching his hometown of Houston disappear http://goo.gl/wm1JL.  With all the recent hoopla regarding the Historic Preservation Ordinance, naturally it caught my attention.  I am hungry for information.

I loved the story and have the similar sense of loss when places that hold some of my most precious memories pass away to make room for something new.  They pass away either because they are demolished or renovated beyond recognition.  I feel the strongest sense of this on the summer vacations we take with the kids each year.  

When I was growing up, each summer my dad would take 2 weeks off from work and we would load up the camper and head across America usually to some national or state park.  Along the way, we would pass through many small towns and cities.  One of the things I enjoyed most about these trips was when we got out of town or out of state, the flavor of everything changed.  The radio announcer and music was different.  The restaurants were different.  The shops and stores were different.  The architecture and people were different.  

Now, today, in our ever changing global world most of this is lost unless you are in a tourist town, with some exceptions of course.  The northeast comes to mind as being the most prevalent exception.  

I have tried to continue this summer vacation tradition with my own kids and this summer was no different.  In the nearly 7,500 miles we drove this summer from Texas to Montana, via New Mexico, Colorado and Utah...then to Banff National Park in Canada before returning via South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to home, I was saddened many times over by the lost character of our nation in general.  Unless we were in a tourist town, which for the most part is frozen in time, we were either in a dying town or a thriving town.  Dying towns we recognized by the descending population and loss of industry and jobs made noticeable by the vacant storefronts and less maintained neighborhoods.  Thriving towns we recognized by the hustle and bustle of businesses and traffic and the same recently constructed strip center with the same stores and same architecture regardless of what state or country we were in. 

For all those quality hours of togetherness in the car, usually spent searching for something "local" on the radio to head off the relentless repetition of "are we there yet?" emanating from the back seat, I came up empty with one exception.  Kansas.  In the cornfields of Kansas I ran across a radio station with a local announcer reading off the cow futures and corn futures and chick futures and lots of other futures and reports on farming of which I can't name because I am not familiar enough with farming to know what I was listening to.  But that didn't matter.  What mattered was it was different and foreign and the back seat got very quiet.  Then the questions came.  In confused and curious voices I was asked, "What are they going to do with so many pounds of beef?  Who is buying all that beef?  Who is selling all that beef?  That's a lot of beef!  Where does that much beef come from?"  And the same went for chicks and pigs and so on....

So you're probably wondering what my point is....that makes two of us.

As I reflected along our trip,  I realized that while I was sad for what I felt I had lost and what I felt my kids could no longer experience, I was in my own world of self pity.  While I was feeling sad, they could not have been more excited.  They were making their own memories and great memories they will be!  The juxtaposition of the old towns with the new in my face over and over from state to state forced me to think about how this happens.  I think it happens because life changes and you either change with it or you die as it passes you by (or you become a museum).  Old towns thrived because they were on a railroad and they were the center of commerce, but as transportation and industry changed, so did the needs of a town.  Old structures and towns are lost purely by economics.  They become economically unfeasible.  Businesses and residents move to where it makes economic sense.  I don't think these things end up left behind because no one wants them.  I think they end up left behind because people and businesses must move to stay economically afloat. 

It's no different in the above scenario than it is for our treasures here at home in Houston.  I took the kids to Astroworld a couple of years before it closed.  When we were there, I kept thinking this is just not right!  This isn't Astroworld!  I felt like I was on  some movie set somewhere and at any moment a street fight was going to explode out of nowhere and I don't scare easily.  The kids operating the rides were not the same caliber as when I visited as a child.  They were not spiffy with smiles stuck on their shiny faces like I remembered.  They were mostly sloppy with shirts half untucked, shorts that didn't fit and devoid of smiles and pride in their jobs.  The buildings were in need of sprucing up and the trash and used chewing gum was strewn about like some sort of ugly dressing.  How they were going to maintain paying customers that would buy goods in their stores I wasn't sure.  And then a couple of years later it closed. 

There is usually a similar story for everything that disappears.  Places have to pay for themselves and be able to support themselves.  This isn't always possible.  And when it isn't, shouldn't it be the owner's right to make the financial decision of what is best for them since they own it and it is their money?  It would be nice if there was some fund that when a historic property became available or was no longer useful in its original form to its owner, that a historic preservation society could step in and write a check and save it.  Short of that, who is supposed to swallow the financial loss?  If big cities and people with big money can't always save something because they don't have pockets deep enough to match their desire, how can the individual home owner be expected to carry that same burden?  This is the same homeowner that has relatively microscopic pockets compared to big cities and big money and does not necessarily have a few extra thousand or tens of thousands to spend keeping their property historic when their needs change.  So the homeowner is left with one choice that makes economic sense:  moving on to another property that fits their changing needs and selling to a pool of buyers that over time grows smaller and smaller because as a culture, everyone's needs change, including buyers.



One can scour the internet in search of housing statistics from the past century.  At http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-12.pdf I found that the average household in 1900 consisted of 4.6 people vs. 2.63 people in 2000.  In addition, there were only 15,964 households vs. 105,480 in 2000.

While bungalows in the early 1900s were 600 - 800 sq. ft., they changed dramatically over the next century.  Researcher Moya Mason sums it up nicely in her article at http://www.moyak.com/papers/house-sizes.html as follows:
(begin)
Physical size of homes continued to grow, while household size was shrinking. Rise of suburbia: abundance of land, cars, and government incentives made home-ownership very popular. Houses were getting bigger: the small house was on the decline throughout most of the century, while the number of people living in a household decreased by 50% in the years 1881-1991 (Ward). Room space + less people = more privacy.

We've gone from having no bedrooms to: In the recent past the middle-class bedroom has become an ever more private place. With its own attached bathroom, telephone, and TV set, the 'main suite' has assumed something of the character of a self-contained apartment. Walled up in their flat within a home, middle-class parents have built an unprecedented barrier between themselves and their offspring. It should come as little surprise, then, that their kids have responded in kind. Since the 60s the number of larger homes has grown while the average number of household residents has shrunk - quite dramatically in fact. One result has been that young children now commonly have a bedroom each, while most adolescents regard this condition as an entitlement, not a privilege. The rooms themselves offer a separate place for schoolwork, and often include radios, televisions, and phones among the many electronic gadgets once available only centrally within the house.

In North America, we all still live in rooms with walls that have doors and windows, we prepare our food in kitchens, we sleep in bedrooms, and wash in bathrooms...The novelty of our age is that our use of the space in our homes changes with a rapidity that can be confusing. And as we transform these spaces, they transform us. These transformations are the result of demographic, economic, lifestyle, environmental, and technological pressures.
(end)

Who is to say what future households will want or need. 
............
Only 1 chance to opt out of the Historic Preservation Ordinance but many chances to opt in.  6 days left to sign the petition.  Read more about the HPO at http://goo.gl/lzT67

HISTORIC PRESERVATION ORDINANCE AS AMENDED 10/13/2010 http://goo.gl/Q1cP

Just want the petition? Print from http://goo.gl/1FYO .   Email signed petition to myself at cynthia@cynthiamullins.com or Bill Baldwin at Bill@yourblvd.com or fax to 866-552-6180, by November 17^th. 

We are trying to educate as many people as possible before this November 17th date so that when the ballot comes in the mail and you have 15 days to return it to the city, we can:

1) remind you it is coming
2) tell you what it looks like so you won't mistake if for junk mail

This exact ballot must be filled out within these 15 days (unknown exactly when as of now, but probably mid December).  If you lose or do not receive your ballot, you can't copy someone else's and turn it in.  AND remember, not returning a ballot means YES for the Historic Preservation Ordinance.
.............................................................................................
visit my entire blog at http://blogs.har.com/cynthiamullins

email cynthia@cynthiamullins.com
follow me at www.twitter.com/cynthiamullins
friend me at www.facebook.com/cynthiamullins1

see what people like about the Heights and what they think is its best kept secret at www.youtube.com/cynthiamullins
houston heights real estate housing market homes for sale buying selling inner loop properties houston texas tx OPEN  Houses 1545 Heights Boulevard, Houston, TX 77008 77007 77009 houston heights realtor Woodland Heights Norhill Sunset Heights