Last year, someone drove into my cousin Spring's mailbox. Shortly after it was replaced, Spring got a letter from her neighborhood association informing her that the numbers on her new mailbox did not fit the development's approved template. Seriously. Now, me personally, I don't like the idea of living in a place where they even HAVE approved templates for mailbox numbers, let alone where someone would go to the trouble of noticing the mailbox numbers and sending a multi-page letter to the offender. But Spring and her family knew when they bought a house in this particular neighborhood that there would be restrictions on what they could and couldn't do with their property, and the benefits outweighed the pain-in-the-ass factor.
Almost 30 years ago, Forsyth County named an 18th century home in Lewisville a local historic landmark, which meant that its owner could receive a substantial tax break in return for preserving the property. This isn't revolutionary. Certain places - such as extant historic landscapes, parks, etc. - belong to the public trust. This is something we as a society decided long ago. And it's fair that a property of public historic significance, but that is maintained by a private family, should be eligible for tax benefits in return.
But now the River John Conrad House's current owners, who bought the property in the late 90s, want to remove it from the list so that they can add a 6,000-square-foot addition, including a swimming pool. Not only would this radically alter the house, but construction of that size would destroy the property's archaeological record. And, in my view, it would also set a very dangerous precedent. If the current owners can successfully argue - decades later - that the act of historic restoration itself destroys the property's historic value - we're talking about standard practices such as replacing floorboards here - then why even HAVE the LHL designation in the first place?
I attended the September county commissioners meeting, where the board voted to ask the county's Historic Resources Commission to take a more detailed look. The board will hear the HRC's unanimous recommendation to keep the Conrad house of the LHL list tonight. Despite this recommendation from the board of local experts appointed to make these very sorts of recommendations, not to mention the State Historic Preservation Office's two cents, certain commissioners are just not hearing it. Two of them should arguably recuse themselves from the vote entirely given personal relationships with the petitioner.
I'm not going to call out certain allegedly moderate Democratic commissioners who are up for re-election next year, but who haven't changed their position on the de-list despite, literally, volumes of historic record, testimony from preservation experts and pleas from dozens of citizens. I'm just going to say that the "property rights" argument in favor of removing the Conrad house's status is horsesh*t. (Ask my cousin Spring's mailbox.)
Despite the common libertarian fantasy of no public standards whatsoever (or, as I call it, Somalia), our society has pretty much settled the idea that we give up a small amount of personal license for the good of the community. That's why I get nasty letters from the city when I let my grass grow too high. And that's why scuttling a decades-old policy that's helped build our community's unique character just because a commissioner whose name rhymes with Schmed Schmaplan has a buddy who wants to build a swimming pool is a REALLY bad idea.
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