A Heritage Worth Preserving?

Eccentric and brilliant comedian Eddie Izzard does a joke about America’s relative youth. He says that in America, people will point to a building and say with great pride, “This building looks like it's fifty years old!” As if a fifty year old building is an accomplishment. Europe has many buildings that are centuries old and some that even pre-date Christianity.

Australia is even younger than America, and yet… Many of the buildings look much older. America, as a country, is all about building something bigger, newer, and more spectacular. If a building happens to be occupying the space the new building would go, it is out with the old and in with the new. Cities change and evolve over time. For example, the strip in Las Vegas has seen old buildings imploded to make way for newer, crazier hotels on a routine basis for the last thirty years. There is an entire website dedicated to videos of Las Vegas hotel implosions, feel free to check it out here.

A typical house in Garden City.

Australia, on the other hand, wants to preserve its heritage as much as possible. I became familiar with my current neighborhood, Garden City, shortly after moving to Australia. At first, I thought, “OK, this is where the poor people live.” I couldn’t have been more wrong. From the outside, the buildings look, well, old.

The neighborhood itself is modeled after a town in England. The houses themselves are made of bricks and the architecture looks antiquated. Constructed in the 1950’s, it looks like the neighborhood has not aged particularly well. Strangely, at one point, no one wanted to live in Port Melbourne. Then one day, people thought to themselves, “Hey, this neighborhood is right by the beach and 5 kilometers (roughly 3 miles) from the CBD (Central Business District or downtown)!”

Prices went up. Significantly. This part I understand. I like living by the beach and there is a limited supply of land by the city and by the beach. The part I do not understand is the heritage laws that govern an owner’s ability to remodel their own home. I have seen what the houses look like on the inside that have not been remodeled and these homes are going for close to a million dollars. In the States, they would be considered tear downs. However, here that is illegal.

The LEFT HALF of this home just sold for over $900k. This shot contains both halves of the house which are owned by separate people.

As if the outside of the house was not ugly enough, check out the kitchen. Keep in mind this is a professional photo used to market the house and it looks this bad!

Our house - a Garden City home after a remodel. Hardwood floors, modern appliances, granite island, and 270 degrees of glass to view the Westgate bridge and Port Phillip. Hey, even Spiderman dropped in to hang out here.

The remodels that I have seen, I will admit, do their best to preserve the look and feel of the neighborhood. The house we currently live in was recently remodeled. The original façade remains, but an additional level was built on top. The linoleum was ripped out and replaced with hardwood floors. We have a beautiful deck that overlooks Port Phillip Bay. Our stove is new and stainless steel. I love living here and having friends over.
However, this update did not come easily or cheaply. The owner spent over three years creating plans and working with the “heritage committee” to get her plans approved. She spent in excess of $35,000 to hire a “heritage consultant”. During this three year process, she received pushback from the committee on design decisions such as, “Does your closet need to be this big?” Why the committee would give a shit about the size of a closet in a homeowner’s home is beyond me, but I feel like America went to war against England for less than that. Compromises were made.

My deck. Notice how the fence is pretty far from the edge. The deck could be much bigger. Thanks heritage committee!

As a parent of young children, I love the glass fencing on our deck. It ensures that we have a good view, but I know my kids are safe playing outside. What I could not understand when we first moved in was why the deck was smaller than it needed to be. The roof extends several more feet and it would seem fairly trivial, from a design perspective, to fence around the boundary of the roof. I found out later that our deck size was dictated by the “heritage committee”. They felt, at the time, that the deck should not be too big because it would make the neighbors feel bad about their own houses if the deck were too big.

So the “heritage committee” is a bloated bureaucracy that makes decisions that affect the lives of citizens as to what they can do their own homes, but at least they preserve the look and feel of the community, right? Wrong! Exhibit A:

One of these houses doesn't look quite like the others. One of these houses doesn't look the same...

Every other house in the community is made of brick and is red. Except this one, and yet somehow the plans got approved by the heritage community. Even worse is this eyesore:

You want a bigger deck? No! You want to put a trailer on top of your house? Um, sure, no problem...

The “heritage committee” looked at plans some bloke drew up that said, more or less, I would like to stick an object that looks like a trailer on the top of my house. Apparently, the “heritage committee” yawned and said, “Sure. Whatever.”

The “heritage committee” makes completely arbitrary decisions about what can and cannot be done to an owner’s own house. They take years to make decisions and the experience is so complicated that most would-be remodelers go out and hire “heritage consultants” to get their plans approved on what they want to do to their own homes. But it gets worse… The members of the “heritage committee” DO NOT EVEN LIVE IN THE COMMUNITIES THEY ARE MAKING DECISIONS ABOUT. Literally everything about them stinks. They do nothing but add massive delays and costs to an already difficult and stressful process of remodeling.
Which brings me to another point, why is it necessary to preserve the heritage in the first place? Immediately adjacent to my somewhat loved Garden City, the ghetto of Port Melbourne, sits the “Bank Houses”. Quickly and shoddily constructed in the 1970’s, these homes were literally owned by the bank. These homes, built of stucco with minimal yards, looked shitty in the 1970’s. Today, they look even shittier. Fifty years from now, they will still look shitty. Yet, they are preserved by “heritage laws”.

The bank houses. For a mile along Williamstown Road, all the houses look exactly like this. Shitty.

Once upon a time, I actually lived in an American community similar to Port Melbourne. It may be hard to believe, but Hermosa Beach was once a rundown little town tucked away in the shadow of Los Angeles. Overnight, many Los Angelinos looked upon my beloved Hermosa Beach and declared, “Hey, there is a rundown little town here that is pretty close to LA. I can buy up a house, remodel it, and still commute to my job!”

And throughout the nineties, that is exactly what happened. Some owners tore down their homes altogether. Some kept just the foundation. Some didn’t change too much about their new property. What was once a town of small, quaint beach cottages was quickly modernized. Only old black and white photos preserve Hermosa’s legacy. As a resident of Hermosa, how did I feel about all of this change? I freaking loved it! People spent a lot of money fixing their homes and making them nice. The money brought in more services, restaurants, and shops. For the home owners, what they did with their own houses was their decision and although there were some planning hoops to jump through back in the States, the process takes a few months, not years.

Old Hermosa Beach

New Hermosa Beach - progress!

To be fair, there are older buildings that I love in Melbourne.

The iconic Flinders Street Train Station.

Yet I feel the “heritage committees” are completely out of control. They make arbitrary decisions over incredibly long periods of time and often times completely fail at preserving the heritage they have decided to protect in the first place. There are neighborhoods that seem burdened by heritage laws, such as the “Bank Houses”, that would be much better off if owners could tear down and start over instead of preserving what was and will always be architecturally horrible homes. Taste cannot be legislated or protected. Taste changes over time. Dictating what an owner can do to their house seems draconian and has proven to be pointless.