Preservation Month 2023: A Note From Our Executive Director
May is Preservation Month and this year’s theme is People Saving Places. During this time of immense growth and change, Preservation Austin could not do what we do without fellow Austin place-savers—our members. This Preservation Month, become a place-saver by joining Preservation Austin and help us reach our goal of gaining 70 new members in honor of our organization's 70th birthday.
New and renewing members who join by May 24 will receive an invite to our 70th Birthday Party at the Driskill Hotel on June 7. Join us to earn more about PA’s essential role in saving this iconic Austin landmark from demolition as we toast seven decades of impassioned advocacy at the site of one of our greatest preservation success stories.
By Lindsey Derrington, Executive Director
Earlier this year The New Yorker published “The Astonishing Transformation of Austin.” You may have read it—it’s an exhaustive piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, that conveys the collective whiplash gripping Austinites grappling with unprecedented growth and change. This change is obvious to anyone, whether you’ve lived here for forty years or five, and is a constant topic of discussion. But that discussion, including in Mr. Wright’s article, rarely connects these challenges to how the historic preservation movement might stem this tide. It’s as if sacrificing our cultural and architectural heritage is inevitable, if tragic.
This begs the question: When will we stop mourning, and take action?
Preservation Austin is charged with the almost Sisyphean task of advocating for historic places that define our city’s character. Rather than look to the past and lament what has been lost, we’re looking to the present, at the incredible places we still have, and are working to protect them for the future.
Most of the South Congress business district lacks historic zoning or demolition protections. Image: South Congress Improvement Association.
None of this work is about being anti-growth, or a false front for the status quo.
Our mission is to empower Austinites to shape a more inclusive, resilient, and meaningful community culture through preservation. One of our strategic priorities is that preservation and growth must coexist to create a world-class city. Our work is grounded in establishing preservation as a community value, both for its inherent worth and for the solutions it presents for existential issues such as equity, sustainability, and affordability.
This includes our ULI Austin Technical Assistance Panel with the City of Austin, recommending policy solutions for preserving historic-age housing, maintaining affordability, and stemming displacement; our Preservation Incentive proposal, developed in partnership with the Austin Infill Coalition to encourage meaningful preservation of historic housing stock while encouraging neighborhood-scale density; and supporting racial and ethnic representation on the Historic Landmark Commission by hosting preservation commission training for BIPOC Austinites, and connecting them with City Council offices filling these appointments.
Mr. Wright talks a great deal about the immense wealth flowing into Austin. We have fourteen billionaires in our city, apparently, existing in a world foreign to most of us, but who may have immense ramifications for Austin down the line. Preservation Austin doesn’t see this wealth reflected in our own support base. We are a small nonprofit whose annual revenues have yet to top half a million dollars. We do so much with so little, supported by about 550 households and businesses across our metropolitan area of more than two million.
There are currently just five full-time professionals working to preserve Austin’s historic places.
The City of Austin’s Historic Preservation Office currently has two staff members when, according to the city’s own 2017 audit, it should have six (for perspective, San Antonio’s Office of Historic Preservation has more than twenty). Preservation Austin has three full-time staff, when we could easily double that and still have more than enough work to go around. In the words of President Biden, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
With such limited resources dedicated to this work, do we wonder at the preservation outcomes we see around us?
Since 2020 Preservation Austin has worked to expand our capacity to serve our mission, with a goal of doubling our operating budget by 2025. We are on track to meet this goal thanks to our board of directors, staff, volunteers, members, sponsors, and major donors, a herculean feat of which we’re extremely proud. This support has translated into more robust programming, and more proactive advocacy and policy development. It’s given us the space to make significant progress towards engaging culturally, racially, and generationally diverse Austinites in our work. But we need to do more.
With increased community support, we could:
Expand Preservation Austin’s matching grant program to give away $100,000 each year; we had $60,000 in grant requests during our January 2023 cycle alone, and were able to fund only a fraction of that amount;
Develop more policy solutions to take to City Council and the Texas Legislature, from a deconstruction ordinance to offset landfill waste from demolitions, to rolling back recent restrictions on historic zoning;
Sustain meaningful community engagement to learn what places matter to Austinites citywide, and what our programming and advocacy can do to enhance their quality of life;
Support owners of older and historic homes by providing comprehensive educational resources on maintenance and energy retrofits, and connect them with qualified contractors for the same;
Establish a preservation roundtable to bring together Austin’s numerous preservation, parks, and cultural nonprofits; city staff from preservation-related departments; county commissions; community development corporations; and relevant university programs to provide a forum for information sharing and partnerships;
Launch family-oriented programming that engages Austin’s next generation, while serving parents who want to see this city’s soul preserved for their children;
Present regular behind-the-scenes tours of historic homes and businesses, and build on our library of self-guided tours to help Austinites see the beauty in historic places they visit every day;
Move the needle on protecting underrepresented heritage sites through historic zoning; just 15 percent of all City of Austin Landmarks honor African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans, along with women. There are no sites that honor Indigenous or LGBTQ Austinites;
Launch a special Legacy Business month to encourage Austinites to patronize local businesses in operation for 20 years or more, providing programming and resources to explore and celebrate these beloved institutions.
This list includes many efforts in the works, and others about which I can only dream. Imagine if Preservation Austin had the resources to do everything that we do now, but better, and had the bandwidth to tackle these new projects as well.
Austin’s changing skyline. Image: CoStar
What would Austin look like then?
We are headed in the right direction. Because of our advocacy, City Council allocated $300,000 to continue its own Equity-Based Historic Preservation Plan effort to ensure that city preservation programs and incentives serve all Austinites equally. The Heritage Grant Program, administered by the City of Austin Economic Development Department, recently awarded more than $2 million in grant funds to preservation projects to promote tourism, including a $250,000 grant for Preservation Austin’s stewardship of the McFarland House. These resources are essential; now we need more staff power to manage and implement them well.
If you’re reading this, then you are aware of this need. You know that we don’t have to choose between preservation and growth—that we can do both, and build a better city for future generations because of it.
And if you’re not a Preservation Austin member, I ask that you take action and become one today.
Your support will translate into more of the dynamic preservation advocacy and programming that Austin so desperately needs. Please join us and tell like-minded friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors why their membership matters as well. Especially when the conversation inevitably turns to despair over our city’s future. They can be part of this change, for the better.
Just think what we can accomplish together.
