Maud, You and the DC Government are Kissing Cousins
While it might not be perfectly analogous, the article below is exactly how jack*** Maud (yes, she deserves to be called that) behaves with her Vienna Historic District:
Human Dignity Also Needs to Be PreservedBy Marc Fisher
Thursday, January 10, 2008; B01For more than a year, Richard Lucas has been trying to win permission to cut through his elderly, infirm parents' front porch so they can get from their living quarters onto the street without climbing stairs. And for more than a year, the D.C. historic preservation authorities have found reasons to say no to a ramp.
After all, as the city's architectural historian put it, "repeating porches of similar height and depth create a notable pattern and rhythm" along the Lucas family's Mount Pleasant street, and the District wouldn't want to let that rhythm be broken just to accommodate a couple of old folks who have lived in their house for 47 years.
Again and again, Lucas tried to satisfy the city's preservation police, paying his architect to rework plans for a ramp to minimize its impact on the supposedly pristine look of the 1930s rowhouses on Walbridge Place NW. But each time Lucas tried, the city came up with more objections. And so, at ages 90 and 87, Cornelius and Merry Lucas remain stuck in their basement rooms, able to come and go only through a back door that opens onto an alleyway.
"Again and again, we've tried to please them, but they're intransigent," says Richard Lucas, who has had to take a large chunk of the money he'd set aside for the ramp and waste it on architects and lawyers. "Instead of a ramp, they wanted us to put in a lift, and we rewrote the plans to do that, and then they weren't satisfied with the angle of the lift. So we changed that, and then that wasn't good enough. Suddenly, it was about wheelchair maneuverability."
Now, on the eve of a hearing before an administrative law judge who handles appeals from the historic preservation board, the District is suddenly interested in settling the Lucas case. Why? Well, let's visit with Kim Kendrick, the nation's top fair-housing official, who read my column about the Lucases a year ago and could hardly believe what she was reading.
"I read your column and said, 'Something is wrong here, and we've got to do something,' " says Kendrick, the assistant secretary for fair housing in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. So she wrote to the District's preservation officials. "Generally in matters like this, people respond with answers promptly. Not the District. In this case, we had to issue subpoenas."
What Kendrick eventually learned disturbed her even more. "I was real concerned when I heard one of the District officials say that they don't have to follow the Fair Housing Act," she says. "One in five persons in this country are disabled, and in a case like this, federal law protecting the disabled applies."
Kendrick visited the Lucas house to see for herself and concluded that "it's just not a good situation for them. For this couple to have to go to the back to get out of their house and to have to live in the bottom level like that is just not the proper accommodation."
A few weeks ago, HUD filed a complaint against the D.C. government, alleging that by denying the Lucases permission to install a ramp, the city is violating anti-discrimination laws. "I hope they would get off the position that historic preservation trumps fair housing or any law that protects the disabled," Kendrick says.
D.C. preservation chief David Maloney said he was prohibited from speaking about the case because of ongoing negotiations. He referred me to city spokesman Sean Madigan, who also declined to comment. Previously, city officials have argued that the Lucases have sufficient access to their house through the alley and that Mount Pleasant, which the city has declared a historic district, needs to preserve the elegant look of the granite retaining wall along the fronts of Walbridge Place rowhouses.
If the city doesn't back down, Kendrick says, the feds will refer the case to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. That, and a year of pressure from a team of lawyers who took on the Lucas case without charge after my column appeared last year, seems to be having an effect. Last week, the D.C. attorney general's office reached out to the Lucases' lawyers seeking settlement talks, which are now underway.
"We've been trying for a year to compromise with them," says Dominic Perella, a lawyer at Hogan and Hartson who has been working on behalf of the Lucases. "We were prepared to sue the city" before the latest negotiations began.
"The whole point of this was so that my parents could enjoy the neighbors and the front of their house and get a little light," Richard Lucas says. "Now they're in declining health and the months just keep going by as the city delays and delays."
"This is not right," Kendrick says. "Preservation does not trump fair housing. The city must follow federal law."
Comments
Hmmm...kissing cousins, inbreeding on the Town Council...Are we in Virginia or WEST Virginia here?
Posted by: Pontific8tor | January 11, 2008 08:53 PM
State vs. Church: March of the Preservation Police
by Mark Fisher
Church members described the chill, the darkness and the gloom that bad design has brought to their spiritual lives. Advocates for the Christian Science Church on 16th Street NW, just two blocks from the White House, told of the extraordinary cost involved in maintaining a building that is too big, too dank and a long way from the religious ideals of their denomination. Lawyers warned the city that it was risking court action if it trampled the rights of a religious community. One member of the church broke down in tears as she told of how the concrete bunker that serves as her church's home detracts from the congregation's ability to serve the homeless and the rest of its mission.
But the District's preservation police, the Historic Preservation Review Board, doesn't care about any of that. It voted 7-0 yesterday to force the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, to keep its crumbling, 36-year-old home, which will now be an official D.C. landmark--protected from demolition or alteration by the city's law.
The church has sought for nearly two decades to avoid the landmark designation, which was requested by a group of academics and architects who consider the building, one of Washington's ugliest, to be a historically important artifact in the history of Brutalism--the school of architecture that brought us such gems as Metro headquarters, the FBI building, the University of the District of Columbia, and the Forrestal and HUD government office buildings.
Two federal laws passed during the Clinton administration seek to protect churches from the kind of extreme preservation mania that the District specializes in. "Church property is often, as is the case here, an expression of a church's theology and religious mission," says Roger Severino, a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, an advocacy group that argued on the Christian Scientists' side. Preservation rules may result in financial hardship for a church, inhibiting the congregation's religious expression, Severino says.
But when Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Mike Silverstein of the Dupont Circle commission tried to bring up that topic at yesterday's preservation board hearing, board chairman Tersh Boasberg interrupted, saying, "We're not here to discuss the First Amendment. We're here to discuss whether the church meets the criteria" set out in the city's landmarking law.
So now the church is stuck at a facility that it does not want and cannot afford. The building, designed as a church, cannot accommodate any other purpose, and it's hardly likely that another church would want a structure that is so antagonistic to human spirituality. The developer who owns the land told the board that he wants to build a new church for the Christian Scientists that would meet their needs, conform to Pierre L'Enfant's plan for the monumental core of the city, and work in concert with an office development his company plans for the adjacent lot at 16th and K streets.
But the preservation board wasn't having any of that. It wants the city frozen in amber, regardless of the capacity of buildings to serve the functions for which they were constructed and regardless of the desires of those who own and use those buildings.
The church "is in a league of its own," said George Washington University professor of American civilization Richard Longstreth, who spoke for the architects seeking the landmark status. It is a "distinctive and original work," and he went on to name a long, long list of architects who believe the church has historical importance and artistic merit.
That was all the board had to hear. The fact that the building's uninsulated concrete is deteriorating didn't matter. Nor did the fact that the building sits beside "an empty and windswept plaza" and presents "a blank, soulless wall" to 16th Street, as church member David Alan Grier, a GW historian, put it. Nor did the contention by church member Amy Meyers that "This building is valuable only inasmuch as it serves its purpose," or her statement that "As Christian Scientists, we don't place much emphasis on church buildings."
The proponents of landmarking had no response to any of these arguments. They merely repeated their view that the only thing that matters is whether the building is an important example of some school of design. "Their rationale boils down to 'we're smarter than you,'" Silverstein said.
To protect some esoteric notion of academic value, the city's preservation board has now sentenced the District's taxpayers to years of expensive legal battle, for surely this landmarking will lead to a lawsuit and surely the city will eventually lose. For better or worse, the laws of this country fiercely protect the separation of church and state, and those laws make quite clear that churches, not governments, get to decide in which building people shall worship and how those congregations get to spend their money. And the Christian Scientists do not want to spend their money shoring up a crumbling example of a failed and arrogant architectural experiment.
By Marc Fisher | December 7, 2007; 6:07 AM ET
Posted by: vienna mommy | January 14, 2008 07:20 PM