Proposed Historic District designation area in Spruce Hill (image courtesy of SHCA).
The Philadelphia Historical Commission, the City’s preservation agency, is calling for public meetings to consider the proposal to designate a part of the Spruce Hill neighborhood as a historic district. The agency will hold two public meetings, on Wednesday, April 17 and Friday, May 10, when property owners and other interested parties are invited to comment on the proposed district. Both meetings will be on Zoom.
The proposed historic district consists of 572 properties and the boundaries are shown on the map above. The map also shows parts of Spruce Hill already designated as Historic Districts and properties included in the Registrar of Historic Places.
The historic designation was proposed last year by the Spruce Hill Community Association (SHCA), which submitted an application to the Historical Commission after a series of community meetings in the neighborhood. The goal of obtaining historic designation is to provide an added layer of protection of historic structures amid a building boom in the area. Designation could also regulate exterior changes to existing buildings like masonry and window replacement.
The April 17 meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. and the May 10 meeting is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. More information on how to join the meetings is available on the SHCA website.
February 23rd, 2024 at 4:08 pm
You gotta love when the community organization, who is supposed to represent the whole community, is so explicitly prioritizing the input of a minority of residents (~20% of spruce hill is homeowners) on a decision that will effect the entire community in perpetuity. Is it just me or is it starting to smell like Park Slope around here?
February 25th, 2024 at 2:45 pm
Great job everyone, adding weeks and months of red tape just to replace rickety old windows and doors that blow cold air into your house. Now bureaucrats will have to approve you doing work on your home, and will force you to use more expensive vendors in their approved list.
How is this equitable? Jannie Blackwell had it right to oppose these historic districts
February 28th, 2024 at 9:35 am
After two beautiful Victorian twins on my block were torn down to build plasterboard student housing that is molding after 5 years with mounds of trash and rats, I am extremely happy to hear about the Historic District.
As for you commenters, I don’t think you are renters or homeowners. I think you are slumlords who live in the suburbs and have too much time on your hand because you don’t have a real job. You just live off others.
February 28th, 2024 at 12:54 pm
Yeesh, is there a single non-curmudgeonly comment on West Philly Local. Like wow people, we have this thing now, it’s called joy.
February 28th, 2024 at 1:18 pm
40yearresident,
I do rent here and have for years. I would like to buy a house and raise a family here, which will be hard to do if 80% of the housing stock remains 3000 sq ft 7 bedroom victorians. Of course I want one, it would literally be a dream home. But even as a higher than average earner, I couldn’t afford it – not in this neighborhood – where sfh’s are regularly going for over a million dollars now. No, but I could afford a modest condo – but you dont really want this neighborhood to be affordable any more.
Happy to chat face to face or over zoom – im sure you would find we have more in common than you think.
February 29th, 2024 at 8:52 pm
comeonyall…..
come to Walnut Hill! great transit (better than Spruce Hill imho) and plenty of 1200-1500sqft 2-3br homes.
March 4th, 2024 at 4:33 pm
I am really happy to hear about the potential historic designation. I was a renter here and it was so sad to watch our beautiful historic home fall apart with no oversight because of our greedy/lazy landlord. While I sympathize with the concerns about the bureaucractic oversight, we have so many derelict landlords that I think it is a necessary evil in this neighborhood. In terms of the cost concerns people bring up, I believe that research on past historic designation debunks that- it does not generally increase home values. This is all about maintaining our neighborhood’s beauty for generations to come, and I am all for that.
March 5th, 2024 at 1:15 pm
hermes,
I keep an eye on homes in walnut hill too! maybe we will be future neighbors
Firebird,
Could you point me to that research? There may be some neighborhoods where costs haven’t risen, but no one would call places like society hill, which used to be a mixed income and dense neighborhood, affordable. There are other examples too, park slope, west village, etc.
It’s also important to note that it’s not the historic district itself causing the values to raise. The historic district simply acts as a non market intervention that makes it more difficult to meet housing demands when they rise. So a demand for a neighborhood goes up, the housing can’t be built to meet the demand.
In some areas that create historic districts in areas without large demand, think Overbook Farms, this isn’t really a problem, but for more urban neighborhoods like ours, it can have really damaging effects. The whole thing strikes me as incredibly short sited and not really thinking about the problem holistically.
Ask yourself, what’s more important for the character of the neighborhood – the people who live here or the buildings?
March 13th, 2024 at 11:58 am
Comeonyall – are you able to make these meetings? It seems VERY convenient that young families and working people are excluded from this process bc they have to be at work during the day and not sitting on Zoom with boomers who have nothing better to do than hate on hypothetical future condos.
Love your perspective – West Philly is more than porches lol, it’s about the people!
March 13th, 2024 at 3:31 pm
My granddady was a boomer. Yup a real boomer. He had a wild hair. He worked down Tuscaloosa ohh and up to Minot North Dakota and the hi-line in Havre Montana. Ohh and he did Pacific north fishing too. A real boomer haha. Never stayed still. Rode the trains west to east.
March 19th, 2024 at 3:38 pm
what the hell that gotta do with this post
April 16th, 2024 at 7:57 am
I wwould not object to the concept if the historical society wanted to create incentives for people to maintain their aging properties.
But what they are doing instead is declaring that they now control everyone else’s property. Homeowners will lose any choice in what they might want to do with their own properties.
Instead of penalizing homeowners, the historical society should be thinking of how they can help homeowners who want to keep their old properties functional.
How about building a fund for historic preservation?
Or why not a a tax break for maintaining historic certified homes?
Nope.
The historic distric wants to punish homeownners with expensive rules, taking away their freedoms and reducing the value of their property.
I see parallels with the pro-life movement:
“We’ll tell you what’s best and we WILL punish you if you disagree.”
April 25th, 2024 at 2:00 pm
Developers are doing great things for this community. Have you seen the amazing rental units above the former home of Swirl Cafe at the corner of 46th and Baltimore? They are very fancy and everyone loves them.