The Rust Belt kind of breaks your "Something I’ve learned in many years working around and adjacent to city planning and historic preservation is that historic architecture is the legacy of bad economic times." point.
My city of South Bend - and dozens others like it - experienced some of the worse economic forces that the U.S. faced in the last 60 years. Certainly some of them did a better job than others of preserving the great historic per WW2 buildings and built form, but the vast majority used the narrative of the local economic decline to demolish their downtowns during urban renewal.
The bad economic times are kind of a necessary, but not sufficient thing. The bad economic times have to last long enough that the buildings become worth preserving to someone, but they also have to end at some point so that people want restore them. I don't know the history of South Bend well enough to comment. Detroit, as discussed, hasn't seen historic preservation because the city still hasn't recovered -so there's lots of historic housing stock, but no market to restore it.
Just looking at the census numbers, South Bend started tanking in the late 60s and early 70s, bottomed out in the 80s -I'd bet its redevelopment was the mid-80s Urban Development projects, like Industrial Development Bonds and slum clearance -which means that it's building stock hadn't been abandoned long enough to become historic. Which is why it was demolished. (Also, in the 80s, not many people were interested in historic preservation -historic preservationism in Vermont kicks off in the late 80s and early 90s when the situation was different.)
Also one thing that gets conflated with this issue is the centuries long culture war between the Puritans/Yankees and the Scots-Irish/Borderers/Appalachians, as described in "Albion's Seed". (If you haven't read it, you should.)
New England towns were built by Puritans with all the hoses close together so that all the neighbors could keep track of each other and make sure each of them was living in a suitable pious and God-fearing manner.
Meanwhile the Appalachians built their houses far apart because it's not of the neighbors' business what a man does on his own property.
> Which is a long way of saying the people who live in Vermont and make it look like a village Conservatives would like to live in are not the people who built those villages. All the original inhabitants were displaced or died. In other words, it’s not deeply rooted conservative community. It’s a skin suit.
The same logic applies to the online conservatives who aspirationally want to live in a small town. Since its aspirational, they clearly don't live in such a town now, and if they were to move to such a town they would by definition not be its original inhabitants.
I don't know how many people talking about it on Twitter really want to live there and how many are being kitschy about it. I do think that the relevant fact about Vermont is probably that it is the result of gentrification, not deliberate creation. The housing stock and village layouts look like they do because that's what they looked like in 1910 when the state started to decline.
The conservatives I know are largely moving into construction that resembles the post-war suburbs, or if they are into historic preservation it's the late 19th century plantation homes that draw their interest. But to your other comment -their home choices very much reflect Appalachian settlement patterns. But it also reflects the cost of building homes here.
The Rust Belt kind of breaks your "Something I’ve learned in many years working around and adjacent to city planning and historic preservation is that historic architecture is the legacy of bad economic times." point.
My city of South Bend - and dozens others like it - experienced some of the worse economic forces that the U.S. faced in the last 60 years. Certainly some of them did a better job than others of preserving the great historic per WW2 buildings and built form, but the vast majority used the narrative of the local economic decline to demolish their downtowns during urban renewal.
The bad economic times are kind of a necessary, but not sufficient thing. The bad economic times have to last long enough that the buildings become worth preserving to someone, but they also have to end at some point so that people want restore them. I don't know the history of South Bend well enough to comment. Detroit, as discussed, hasn't seen historic preservation because the city still hasn't recovered -so there's lots of historic housing stock, but no market to restore it.
Just looking at the census numbers, South Bend started tanking in the late 60s and early 70s, bottomed out in the 80s -I'd bet its redevelopment was the mid-80s Urban Development projects, like Industrial Development Bonds and slum clearance -which means that it's building stock hadn't been abandoned long enough to become historic. Which is why it was demolished. (Also, in the 80s, not many people were interested in historic preservation -historic preservationism in Vermont kicks off in the late 80s and early 90s when the situation was different.)
Also one thing that gets conflated with this issue is the centuries long culture war between the Puritans/Yankees and the Scots-Irish/Borderers/Appalachians, as described in "Albion's Seed". (If you haven't read it, you should.)
New England towns were built by Puritans with all the hoses close together so that all the neighbors could keep track of each other and make sure each of them was living in a suitable pious and God-fearing manner.
Meanwhile the Appalachians built their houses far apart because it's not of the neighbors' business what a man does on his own property.
> Which is a long way of saying the people who live in Vermont and make it look like a village Conservatives would like to live in are not the people who built those villages. All the original inhabitants were displaced or died. In other words, it’s not deeply rooted conservative community. It’s a skin suit.
The same logic applies to the online conservatives who aspirationally want to live in a small town. Since its aspirational, they clearly don't live in such a town now, and if they were to move to such a town they would by definition not be its original inhabitants.
I don't know how many people talking about it on Twitter really want to live there and how many are being kitschy about it. I do think that the relevant fact about Vermont is probably that it is the result of gentrification, not deliberate creation. The housing stock and village layouts look like they do because that's what they looked like in 1910 when the state started to decline.
The conservatives I know are largely moving into construction that resembles the post-war suburbs, or if they are into historic preservation it's the late 19th century plantation homes that draw their interest. But to your other comment -their home choices very much reflect Appalachian settlement patterns. But it also reflects the cost of building homes here.