Moving beyond main street: the impact of historic preservation tax credits on inner-ring residential suburbs
Creators: name: DeFilippo, Natalie Branco
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2010

description: As a tangible link to the past, historic buildings represent the connectivity between then and now. Their continued service as residences, institutions, and businesses, often remade many times over, demonstrate the capacity for and celebration of architectural and functional evolution. Cobbled together into neighborhoods, these structures gain a contextual framework in which to fit and become a part of shared history. Alterations of these homes, specifically rehabilitation3, represent investment by individual homeowners to create a more livable space; taken together, they signify neighborhood vibrancy and the continued assurance their story will be told. However, historic preservation has been long viewed as a cultural endeavor undertaken as a greater public good to preserve and display the heritage of a place. More recently, preservationists have advocated for a more progressive view; namely, that renovation and rehabilitation have significant economic impacts on historic areas. State and local initiatives followed with their focus directed squarely, and logically, on downtowns. However, historic structures are not limited to commercial storefronts along "Main Street," and inner-ring residential suburbs often contain properties valuable to a city for a multitude of reasons beyond heritage conservation and tourism. Rehabilitating old homes provides economic, cultural, and social benefits that can significantly and positively benefit a city. Therefore, this paper will examine the impact of one of the main tools available to residents of historic neighborhoods, state historic preservation tax credits for non-incoming producing properties offered by the state of North Carolina, analyze their effectiveness to induce neighborhood invigorating reinvestment in National Register historic districts, and determine the impact to the neighborhood and city through a case study of Trinity Park in Durham, North Carolina. First, the evolution of the neighborhood's historic structures over the past twenty-two years, including additions, renovations, demolitions, damage from natural hazards, and new construction, was compiled into a database and analyzed to determine if state tax credits, offered only in that past ten years, could be attributed to increased renovations. Further, this paper will also determine the impact of this reinvestment to the immediate and larger community to evaluate the utility of state historic tax credits to encourage transformative change. Using estimated fair market values provided by the City of Durham over the nine-year span from 2001 to 2010, including one revaluation in 2008, basic summary statistics were calculated and examined to assess and compare change over time in Trinity Park and in the City of Durham as a whole. In addition, approximated city tax revenues were computed using the marginal tax rate in order to illustrate one possible impact that state tax credits have on the city as a whole. Taken together, a picture of overall effectiveness began to emerge. Overall, two hundred and ten separate significant alterations to historic structures were observed since 1987, of which one hundred thirty two were substantial renovations. Representing approximately half of the housing stock, reinvestment in Trinity Park is clear.