Four Myths About Preservation And Zoning

Sometime before the end of this year the Oak Park Village Board will vote on whether or not to end exclusionary zoning, and some homeowners are freaking out.

People can agree to disagree on whether Oak Park should continue to be zoned like it was in the 1950s. But opponents of rezoning should be making their decisions with complete information, and there's a lot of misinformation flying around about how zoning reform will impact preservation. Fortunately, there’s a simple answer: rezoning doesn't impact preservation at all.

You can take my word for it, or read on to learn more than you want to know about how preservation functions in our village.

Zoning Reform Eliminates Historic Preservation

No, it doesn't. Zoning and historic preservation are two different laws. Zoning is about land use, and preservation is about existing structures.

Take Carollina Song and Alec Harris's Peter and Emma Beachy House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Our current zoning code says that the Beachy House lot can be used only for a single-family house. But it says nothing about whether that house needs to be a Wright house. Our zoning allows a new owner of the Beachy House to demolish it and replace it with a McMansion.

What keeps the Beachy House protected (besides Carollina Song and a tire iron) is our preservation ordinance. The Beachy House is a designated landmark, sited in the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, within which over 90% of structures are designated "contributing". If you’re looking to alter a landmark or contributing structure, you need approval from the Historic Preservation Commission (the HPC).

The Historic Preservation Process Is Advisory

I've seen this one a bunch lately. No, it's not.

Here's how historic preservation works in practice in Oak Park. You own a contributing structure in a historic district. You want to, say, add a dormer to it, to convert your attic into a living space. But that’s a "significant demolition" visible from the street. So, before you can get the permits, you first need a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) from the HPC.

The HPC consists of 9 snooty and opinionated architects and preservation experts who have, at least as far as I can detect, absolutely no sense of humor about changing anything. I’ve watched homeowners try for COAs. It’s not fun. They usually have to hire architects to appear for them in front of a hostile HPC.

I am so far describing a straightforward binding process. But there are two things about it that seem to confuse people into believing that the HPC is toothless.

First, there really is an advisory process, the “Certificate of Advisory Review”, that kicks in on any construction project short of demolition. The less you know about this the better, unless you own a contributing house in the historic districts, in which case: replacing your roof might be more annoying than you’d expect.

Second, the Village Board can override the HPC and issue a COA on its own. That's because the Village Board can vote to override almost any process in the Village government, from liquor licensing to zoning. It's a requirement of the Illinois constitution. If your concern is that the trustees are going to override all the COAs going forward, zoning doesn't protect you: they can override that too. It's good to be an elected!

The Village Board Is Revising The Preservation Ordinance

Some opponents of zoning reform believe that the Village Board is going to slip changes to the preservation ordinance under the wire at the same time as the rezoning. Not going to happen.

The board took roughly 4 years to make zoning reform happen. There are two big reasons things take so long:

• Like most American municipalities Oak Park can't tie its shoes without running 1-3 major consulting projects. The board and staff take months to recruit consultants. Staff takes further months to kick off the project. The consultants bill more months still. Then staff eats another month metabolizing the consulting output, and yet another month is burned by a “readout” presentation before the board. The board schedules a study session; another month slips by. At last, the board can vote. In many cases — and preservation is almost certainly one of them — you actually need to do two things, come up with a plan and then “codify” it in ordinance language, so you get to run this process twice.
• An under-appreciated fact of Oak Park governance: it takes forever to get anything done in a citizens commission, because they can only meet once a month — you can’t just call a new meeting — and their agendas are fixed in advance. The board runs changes through the commissions, and major changes implicate multiple commissions.

Nobody has even proposed altering our preservation ordinance. Good luck with so much as fixing a typo in it in under 18 months. We are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

The Village Board Routinely Overrules Historic Preservation

People have been saying this continually for years. I can show you the data and let you make up your own mind. When the board overrules the HPC to issue a COA, it records the decision in an ordinance. Since 2014 we’ve been recording all our ordinances in Legistar, and so I tracked all the overrides down.

In the past 12 years, trustees have overruled the HPC just 6 times. That's infrequent enough that we can look at each case.

• In 2017, the board voted to issue a COA against a 4-4 deadlocked HPC to allow a 2-story addition near Kenilworth and Randolph. A wrap-around porch concealed that addition from the street. 25 neighbors wrote in support of the application — this is what you're up against renovating your house in much of Oak Park, so buy good Halloween candy. Dan Moroney, then a member of the HPC, appeared at the board meeting to lobby for an override.
• In 2020, the board voted to allow the Drechsler funeral home on Marion to be demolished. Over the years, owners had extensively modified the building in ways that made it useful only as a funeral home. Village staff informed the board that it no longer considered the Drechsler home a "contributing structure". The board vote was unanimous and included preservationist stalwarts Jim Taglia and Simone Boutet.
• In 2023 the board voted to allow the demolition of 742 Marion. The house was totaled during a winter storm in the middle of the pandemic. The HPC refused demolition, demanding instead that the owners somehow retain the facade of the existing house and build a new house around it. The board overturned unanimously, including stalwarts Taglia, Ravi Parakkat, and Lucia Robinson.
• In October 2023 we get our first contentious case. It's deadly boring. We’re on East and Erie this time. A dormer. The HPC does not like dormers. Negotiations. Can dormers cover 60% of the roof? 50%? 10%? Whatever. The board voted 4-3 to allow 60% of the roof to be demolished, with Robinson and Parakkat both deferring to the HPC.
• A month after that we get our second contentious case. This one pisses me off. A house on Marion and Thomas was originally designed with a baluster porch, which was later replaced with a cosmetic Prairie style porch. When it rotted, the HPC refused to allow the restoration of the original baluster porch. Screw history: the period of merit for architecture in Oak Park is the Prairie School. We don't really “preserve” so much as run an architectural theme park. The board votes 4-3 to allow the owners to have a safe, functional porch. This time Robinson and Parakkat voted with the HPC, along with President Scaman, which: come on, Vicki.
• Finally, we come to the Arcade Building proposal. I've written at length about this case already. Two things to add here, though. First, a vocal contingent of anti-housing and zoning skeptics are organized around opposition to the Arcade development; preventing this development was a big deal. And second, everybody on the board other than trustee Enyia voted to overrule the HPC, including Jim Taglia.

So what have we learned?

First: it sucks to be a homeowner in the Oak Park historic districts, at least if you want to renovate and repair your own house. You might own it, but the HPC calls a lot of the shots.

Second: unless you believe Jim Taglia, Dan Moroney, Simone Boutet, Ravi Parakkat, and Lucia Robinson secretly harbor a grudge against preservation, it's just not the case that the board disfavors the HPC. We rarely override the HPC, and when we do, the cases are often so cut-and-dried that our most fervent preservationist trustees are voting in favor.