L.A. City Office of Historic Resources Launches SurveyLA-Long Overdue Inventory of L.A.'s Architectural Legacy

The Office of Historic Resources just launched the Los Angeles Historic Resources Survey-SurveyLA. What is the significance and purpose of this city program?

SurveyLA is long overdue. Los Angeles has lacked any comprehensive inventory of its historic resources-what they are and where they are-throughout this huge city of more than 465 square miles. Without a historic resources survey we have not successfully linked historic preservation and planning; we have not had comprehensive information about our historic resources in order to shape good planning decisions. As a result, we've typically approached historic preservation in a reactive, eleventh-hour mode, rather than in a more proactive, anticipatory manner.

Typically, communities have only rallied to save significant historic places at the last minute, when they have become threatened. That's the very worst way to approach historic preservation, because the motives of preservationists and community members are viewed as suspect-that they are really trying to stop change or block development. And it's the very worst system for property owners and applicants, who face delays and unanticipated opposition well after they have made key investment decisions and have begun their entitlements processes.

The survey will benefit communities and preservationists by enabling them to identify what is most architecturally, historically, and culturally significant in their own area. It will benefit owners and private sector developers by creating greater up-front certainty to guide their development and investment decisions. It will benefit planners and policy makers by enabling the city to make planning decisions with the full knowledge of how those decisions will potentially impact historic buildings and historic neighborhoods. And it will tell us where we can take advantage of opportunities for adaptive reuse and reinvestment in our historic buildings.

In TPR's last interview with you, in August of 2006, you had just been hired to what was then the new Office of Historic Resources. Part of the reason for the creation of that office was the need for this historic survey. How would you describe the evolution of the office and the survey over the last three years?

We spent much of our first year putting together the staffing for the Office of Historic Resources and then got to work creating the many tools necessary to conduct the survey in a city as large and complex as Los Angeles. The survey is structured around a grant agreement with the J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Foundation is providing a multi-year matching grant to the city, and the Getty Conservation Institute, which laid the groundwork for the survey between 2001 and 2006 with a series of valuable reports, is continuing to provide support and technical assistance to the project.

While many cities have conducted citywide historic resources surveys, none have been conducted at the huge scale we operate here in Los Angeles; the closest was in Chicago, which conducted a survey in the 1980s and 1990s that took 12 years in a city that is about half the land area of Los Angeles. We needed to create entirely new systems and methodology to do a survey like this in a fraction of that time and at a reasonable cost.

Drawing upon the advice of the Getty and the State Office of Historic Preservation, we've begun by creating a "Citywide Historic Context Statement," which is essentially the analytical framework to assist the survey teams in making sound and consistent evaluations across the entire city. The context statement distills everything that we know about Los Angeles-its architecture, its historic evolution, and its wide variety of architectural styles and property types-into a guide for the professional survey teams. So, when they are, for example, standing in front of a Spanish Colonial Revival style house, they will have a comprehensive understanding of how that style of architecture evolved and why it is significant to Los Angeles' architectural history or overall growth and development. The context statement will also create "eligibility standards" which "set the bar" by essentially defining what qualities and physical characteristics a particular building or resource must retain to be considered significant.

We have also developed a state-of-the-art survey database and field survey tool, again with assistance from the Getty. Historic resources surveys used to be laboriously conducted with paper and clipboard, and the finished results were written up in a bound report that typically gathered dust on a shelf somewhere in city government. Now the survey will be conducted in a much more streamlined and technologically savvy way. The professional survey teams-historic preservation consultants and architectural historians-are going out in the field with tablet personal computers loaded with information from the context statement and are able to download information from the city's geographic information system (ZIMAS), which has detailed, parcel-based information on every property in the city. Survey professionals will be able to document properties quickly by making selections from a handful of drop-down menus on their computer screens.

The database will also have information from the far-reaching public participation program that we've put into place: this includes our web site, www.surveyla.org, a SurveyLA video that's airing regularly on LA Cityview, Channel 35, and a volunteer speakers bureau that is helping us reach out to neighborhood councils, historical societies, and other community groups. Before we come into any community and begin our survey field work, we'll be eliciting information from local community members about each neighborhood's "hidden gems"-particularly places of deeper social or cultural significance that might otherwise be overlooked by our survey teams. All of that collective community memory and knowledge will be available to the survey teams in their database, to help inform their evaluations.

The survey results, once they're vetted, will be available to everyone on the web-to the public and to all city departments, rather than having each department horde their own survey information and even duplicate work, as has happened for decades.

Since last December we've been completing three pilot surveys in five areas of the city to test all of these tools before we roll out the survey citywide. These pilot surveys are proceeding even better than we'd anticipated and are well within budget, which bodes very well for the rest of the project. We had a citywide event at the Central Library on April 4th to begin our public outreach for the citywide launch of the project, and more than 300 enthusiastic attendees participated.

Who are the stakeholders with an interest in SurveyLA? And who is essential to realizing this plan?

There are multiple stakeholders. Obviously, the historic preservation community and community groups are watching the survey as a tool that will more proactively identify important historic buildings and historic neighborhoods around the city. The development community and private sector investment community is also key. While there are some private sector owners who are nervous that the survey could identify properties as significant that had not been previously identified, savvy developers-those who have been through city development processes or preservation battles in the past-are very enthusiastic about the survey because they understand that it is better to have information about whether a property is significant up front, before they have gone months or years into an approval process. We're also making it clear that identification in the survey is not tantamount to historic designation: if a property or neighborhood is identified as significant it will not be treated as equivalent to a city Historic-Cultural Monument or Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ).

We have been working with about a dozen city agencies, including CRA/LA, which is conducting a number of surveys in redevelopment project areas: our office is helping to oversee that survey work and the finished results will go into the SurveyLA database. Many other agencies, including the Bureau of Engineering, L.A. Housing Department, Community Development Department, and Rec and Parks, are key partners. All of them understand the value of having a single citywide database accessible by all departments.

The Planning Commission will be considering amendments to the Cultural Heritage Ordinance this May. What might those amendments include, and how important are they to the city?

The city's Cultural Heritage Ordinance has been in place since 1962. L.A. was actually one of the first large American cities to pass a historic preservation ordinance. But our basic preservation law has not caught up with state-of-the-art preservation measures in other cities or with the tremendous evolution in historic preservation in L.A. since the 1960s. The Cultural Heritage Ordinance is long overdue for a significant tune up.

Most members of the public have the impression that if a building is designated as a City Historic-Cultural Monument (a local landmark) in Los Angeles it is protected from demolition. In fact, almost the very opposite is true here. Unlike most major cities, the Cultural Heritage Commission-our local preservation commission-cannot deny demolition of a Historic-Cultural Monument under our current ordinance. It can only delay demolition for a maximum of 180 days. There is an additional 180-day delay by a majority vote of the City Council. We have modeled our revised demolition language in the ordinance on provisions that have existed in our city's other preservation law, the Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ) Ordinance, for almost 30 years. The ability to deny demolition has existed for even very modest "contributing buildings" in the HPOZs. But we have much weaker protections in place for our most cherished individual landmarks. The new ordinance language will still allow decision makers to approve demolitions, either in cases of economic hardship or upon a finding that the public benefit of an alternative use of the property significantly outweighs the public benefits from preservation.

Another change will increase the size of the Cultural Heritage Commission from five members to seven members to ensure a greater cross-section of professional expertise. We are also putting in place some changes to improve due process for property owners. For example, under the current ordinance, an owner is not notified immediately if their building is nominated for Historic-Cultural Monument status. In fact, a first hearing takes place before the Cultural Heritage Commission with the property owner kept completely in the dark: we're proposing to change that so owners are notified of the very first hearing and can participate in all public processes affecting their property.

The proposed ordinance has been developed in conjunction with the Cultural Heritage Commission as well as a working group that was assembled last year by the Office of Historic Resources and Council President Eric Garcetti. The working group included representatives of the Central City Association, American Institute of Architects, other representatives from the development and preservation communities, and multiple city departments.

We have had some concern and opposition from property owners of existing Historic-Cultural Monuments about some provisions in the ordinance that would require an owner keep Historic-Cultural Monuments in good repair to avoid "demolition by neglect" (where a property is intentionally run down so there is no alternative but demolition). We've pointed out to those owners that such basic maintenance requirements already exist in greater detail for every property in the city, historic or non-historic, in the city's building code.

Well over 90 percent of requests of alterations of Historic-Cultural Monument properties are currently signed off administratively, usually on the same day, over the counter or electronically. That will continue to be the case under the new ordinance. The ordinance will not change the basic historic preservation standards used to evaluate proposed changes to historic buildings: these are the same standards used by every local government nationally, and are meant to allow historic buildings to change and evolve, not to freeze them in time. The new ordinance does provide greater clarity, specifying that certain types of work on designated properties, such as ordinary maintenance and repair, is actually exempt from review altogether. So, overall, the new ordinance provides greater protections and clarity for owners as well as stronger protections for individual landmarks.

There are currently 15 proposed HPOZs in the city. What should our readers expect regarding these HPOZs?

We now have 24 HPOZs in the city. We have seen a tripling of the historic districts in the city in the last decade, which is remarkable growth in our overall historic preservation program. There are at least 15 more HPOZs in the pipeline: some of them have been awaiting or have recently completed historic resources surveys that lay the groundwork for passage of HPOZs.

We are awaiting the results of the city budget process to have greater clarity for how quickly those HPOZs will be approved. The Department of City Planning currently has about 100 vacancies, representing about 25 percent of the authorized staff of the department. Many of those positions are needed to process new applications for HPOZs through the city's approval process and to handle the caseload that would be generated if they were approved. We're hopeful that we'll be able to assist many of these communities that have been waiting many years for HPOZ status. But we will know much more about the schedule for those HPOZs in the next two or three months.