Mayor Cherelle Parker says that after public safety, nothing is more pressing for Philadelphia than access to housing. Yet the City’s Historical Commission keeps trying to make more housing unaffordable. On October 7, Court of Common Pleas Judge Christopher Hall ruled for a second time that the Commission’s designation of Washington Square West as a historic district was unlawful on multiple grounds, while also being “broadly unpopular.” The City should take no for an answer and not appeal this ruling.

Historic preservation puts real costs on homeowners. Once a property is designated, nearly all exterior work needs Commission approval, and the review ignores cost: In the words of an Architectural Committee member, the committee “does not need to concern itself with costs.”

The preservation community insists those costs don’t exist: Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance, told the Commission in January 2025 that “there really is no evidence that historic designation kills affordability … That is a myth.” Now there is evidence. Our study of Washington Square West, built from the City’s own permit records, found that since the Commission took control in March 2024, the average newly designated property spends $1,450 a year more on permitted work than it would have without designation.

The preservation tax does not arrive as an annual bill. It lands all at once.

We call it the “Preservation Tax.” The tax does not arrive as an annual bill. It lands all at once: $30,000 more for the wood windows one owner had to install while rebuilding after a fire, or a custom front door quoted at $13,000 because a $2,000 off-the-shelf door is no longer allowed. On top of these direct costs that we can measure from City permit data, owners report work simply not done because of the cost, leaving them with drafty, rotting windows, doors and shutters.

Residents burdened with these increased costs get no tax credit, no grant and no repair fund from the City, and no help from the Preservation Alliance (which nominated the district and vigorously fought for it in court). We’re expected to shoulder it ourselves, despite not wanting to be designated in the first place (85 percent of the written comments the Commission received opposed the district).

There are advantages to and ways around historic restrictions, but they are designed for developers and the City, not homeowners. Developers can get zoning flexibility with a designation (removing parking requirements, and allowing commercial uses in residential zones), and if a designation makes their project a money loser, they can get exempted by showing it could not have “provided a reasonable rate of return on the investment,” a standard that can’t apply to a home. No homeowner calculates a rate of return on repairs or improvements — they just want to maintain the house they and their family live in. The City looks after itself: When the administration opposed designating the Roundhouse, its own designees on the Commission voted it down, and the City does not enforce on itself the rules it enforces on others. Reality is, the restrictions of historic designation fall hardest on homeowners and we’re the ones that get the least help.

Reality is, the restrictions of historic designation fall hardest on homeowners and we’re the ones that get the least help.

You may say that the costs of a $1,450 Preservation Tax are worth it; historic buildings should be preserved, but what was actually designated tells a different story. Exactly 1,337 properties were included in the district by the Commission, but about half (719) were already individually designated. The designation changed nothing for them. The remaining 618 are far less notable.

Whole sections of the district are made up of modern rowhomes with no specific historical significance ascribed to them. There are also large areas of parking lots, parks and vacant lots, which they tried to justify for their archaeological potential. The nominators tried to defend such a broad district by saying its period of significance ran from 1740 to 1985, a period that would take in about 93 percent of the buildings in Philadelphia today, or that it is made up of rowhouses, which describes 72 percent of the single-family homes in Philadelphia. Either way, if you want to say that these rationales justify a historic designation, then you are also arguing to designate most of Philadelphia as historic and apply the Preservation Tax to almost all homeowners in the city.

Designating most of the city does seem to be coming closer and closer to reality. In the first two-and-a-half years of the Parker administration, the Commission has gone on a designation spree, applying designations to 813 properties per year, well ahead of prior mayors (Kenney, 355; Nutter, 57; Street, 300; Rendell, 507), and 3.5 times the average across all mayors since 1956 (230/year). One would think that over time designations would slow down as the significant buildings would have already been designated, but instead the City is applying a broader and broader definition of what is historic to designate larger and larger swaths of the City. The Commission itself says that “designation tasks occupy much of the staff’s time,” and it lists at least five district efforts in the works.

When asked, homeowners said they didn’t want this. Since designation the affordability concerns have proven to be real and significant. And a judge has now ruled twice that the designation was unlawful, finding that:

1. 1. The district did not meet the legal definition of a district.
   2. The nomination did not explain why most of the properties belonged in the district.
   3. The nomination was written by a sitting member of the Commission, who was paid by the Preservation Alliance for her efforts.

We respectfully ask that the Parker administration not allow the Commission to appeal the judge’s decision and not spend more taxpayer money fighting to make homes in Philadelphia harder to afford. We share the mayor’s goal of keeping Philadelphia affordable. We ask her to apply it to our neighborhood too.

Jonathan Hessney is a Washington Square West homeowner, a co-founder of Philadelphians for Rational Preservation, and one of the appellants in the case over the neighborhood’s historic district. The group’s report, The Preservation Tax, is at preservationtax.org.

The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who represent that it is their own work and their own opinion based on true facts that they know firsthand.

MORE ON HISTORIC PROPERTIES IN PHILADELPHIA