HDLC

T-P: Historic New Orleans neighborhoods to get new guidelines

A draft of the proposed revised guidelines will be presented to the public Tuesday at a joint meeting of the New Orleans HDLC and Central Business District HDLC. It will start at 6:30 p.m. in the parish hall of Grace Episcopal Church, 3700 Canal St.

At the meeting, Dominique Hawkins, a Philadelphia consultant hired to write the document, will present the proposed revisions and the public will be able to ask questions and make comments.

HDLC is a non-elected, unapproachable quasi-governmental body empowered to levy fines on people whose houses don't conform to the arbitrary aesthetic ideals set forth by a club of social elites. They love to talk about "historic preservation" as though they're doing God's work, but mostly what they do is make it as difficult as possible for families of modest means to own homes in much of New Orleans.

Besides the irony that working class families are being excluded through the "preservation" of architectural forms originally developed out of the necessity of providing affordable housing for those very same sorts of working class families, preservation boards like HDLC also hamstring innovations that could reduce societal costs of living such as energy consumption.

Of course, every 40 years or so they make a move to catch up to some of that stuff.

"LeBlanc said the most up-to-date thinking about historic preservation influenced the proposed revisions, such as addressing energy-efficiency measures and streamlining the method of rating the significance of buildings in historic districts.

The guidelines we had didn't address any of the advances in technology since the 1970s, so every time someone wanted to install solar panels, for example, we didn't have any consistent guidelines to go by," he said. "Now we will."

Here's a true story. My parents, after an extended and frustrating period of haggling with the HDLC restrictions in the Irish Channel finally moved into their newly constructed home this year. During the contentious approval process, Mom and Dad appealed for permission to install solar panels on their new roof. They were flatly turned down at first but after some argument they were grudgingly granted a response of, "Well... maybe if they're hidden under a tree or something." And so they just decided to drop the whole thing.

Also, note that the existence of "guidelines" celebrated in this article doesn't necessarily mean the guidelines will be particularly friendly to innovation in the future. But nobody ever said rule by a patrician class would be efficient, only that it would be pleasing to the patricians.