One of my MIT grad school classmates bought a decrepit beach house in Beverly, Massachusetts, the renovation of which ran afoul of various town committees. The Boston Globe ran a story on October 5, 2014 about how the multi-year approval process will end: “Beverly’s historic Loring House set to fall; Roomba co-creator eyes demolition”.
Most of the argument seems to have concerned stuff that was going to happen inside the house.
[The historic commission guy’s use of the term “nouveau riche” was inappropriate in my opinion, though I guess it makes it obvious that he doesn’t like Helen (we all liked her back in grad school! So I guess this is evidence that success breeds envy/enemies). The term makes sense in a country such as France or England with a nobility, but not in the U.S. The people who built that house were lawyers, according to the article, not dukes and princesses. Being an inventor in 2014 is not somehow crass compared to being a lawyer in the U.S. in the mid-19th century.]
IMO – the historic commission comes off very badly here. Buy it at market value from the owner and fix it as you see fit. Otherwise get out of the way. Instead they will let her tear it down instead of compromise on a porch. Outstanding negotiation skills.
Update: The English press is writing about this too! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2782981/Roomba-millionaire-fire-plan-sweep-away-historic-oceanfront-Loring-House-built-Civil-War-general.html
This shouldn’t be a surprise at all for those who had to deal with the town councils.
Recent stories:
1) A friend owns a modest house in a modest Boston suburb. The friend wanted to build an enclosure for the porch and needed the town’s approval. The process took about six months.
2) Another friend wanted to rent a small commercial space and open a flower shop, in a town from rural Massachusetts. The town council refused.
3) A friend of a friend has a car repair shop and put a sign outside the shop. The town council objected to the sign’s mounting angle, due to some potential obstruction, and they’re now threatening to close his business.
She should do the following:
1. Photographically document the position of and salvage all the architecturally important elements – the wood panelling and carved staircases, the stained glass, etc.
2. Demolish the house to the ground as is her legal right. Once the decorative elements are removed, what is left is just a bunch of old rotten wood and plaster.
3. Rebuild the house exactly as she was planning to do, but this time using modern materials, insulation, underfloor heating, wiring, plumbing, etc. This will probably not even cost a lot more than a renovation. Renovations are expensive because you have to thread systems inside of existing walls, there is all sorts of hidden rot, etc. – it’s faster and easier to start with a clean slate.
4. Reinstall the salvaged architectural elements in the new structure. On the surface it will look exactly like what she was planning on doing (the original house plus some new porches), but under the skin it will be a better building than it ever was, because there has been progress in technology, plus instead of 100 year old half-rotten wood, she will have brand new wood.
By the way, this is basically what was done to the White House in 1950. The building was stripped down to an empty shell leaving only the 4 exterior walls and everything you see inside today is a reconstruction.
http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/images/white-house-1950-shell.jpg
If you look at this the other way (thru the eyes of historic preservationists) this is demolition by neglect – the owner stops maintaining the property and lets it deteriorate (it looked great as recently as those photos) and then she says that the property is beyond fixing and must be demolished.
From their point of view, this is just a loophole in the law that is begging to be fixed, so the next time that dirty capitalist won’t be able to destroy our heritage. There are however, constitutional issues – at some point government regulation becomes a “taking” that requires compensation. They can delay demolition (thus the 1 year moratorium) but cannot deprive you of the right to make “reasonable” use of it forever or else they have to pay you as if they condemned it for public use. Otherwise the preservationists would have “fixed” this law already.
Jackie: If you can evaluate the condition of the house, which presumably Helen had paid money to keep weather-tight, by looking at a photo you should take a job as a divorce judge here in Massachusetts! (The 2011 statute says that a defendant can stop paying alimony at age 67 but judges have taken to eyeballing defendants from the bench, evaluating their health, and saying “I think you can work for your plaintiff until age 72”.)
The article says that Helen bought the house in 2012 and that “it has been unoccupied for years” (at least three years following the death of the previous owner who, apparently, was rather neglectful with maintenance).
So I don’t think that the commission was blaming the new owner for 25 years of decay. People up there understand that an old wooden house exposed to the ocean in New England very likely to be in very bad shape.
Phil – just to be clear, that’s not my personal view. I was channeling a hypothetical preservationist. Personally, I think you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with your own property.