photo by: Bremen Keasey

Residential houses in the University Place neighborhood of Lawrence looking from the intersection of 18th Street and Indiana Street. Lawrence officials and preservation advocates are exploring options like demolition moratoriums as a way to protect historic structures as the new development code comes into view.

Lawrence’s new Land Development Code has a lot to say about what can be built and where, but for Mike Delaney, the more urgent question is how easy it will be to tear things down.

Delaney is the president of the Lawrence Preservation Alliance, and he and other advocates worry about what will happen when the new rules take effect in April 2025. If the code incentivizes development in older neighborhoods, they fear that buildings that might have had historic value could be demolished without anyone even realizing they qualified for historic protections.

To keep that from happening, the advocates are calling for the city to stop the clock — pausing demolition activity in certain places so there’s more time to determine which buildings have historic value.

“There ought to be some protection in place, at least until properties are surveyed,” Delaney said.

Delaney is specifically calling for a moratorium on demolitions in University Place, where a historic survey of properties is currently underway. Advocates for East Lawrence, where many properties haven’t been surveyed, are seeking a moratorium in their neighborhood, too.

And on the City Commission, there’s been some talk about protections like these — both to keep the character of the neighborhoods intact and to ensure that the resources the city spends on historic preservation don’t go to waste.

Mike Delaney

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One of the best ways to protect a building or part of the city from demolition or significant changes is getting it on the local, state or national historic register. If developers want to do certain things to a structure that’s on the register, or to develop anything within a 250-foot “context area” of such a structure, they have to go through an approval process that might require a vote by the city’s Historic Resources Commission, said Lynne Zollner, the city’s historic resources administrator.

But to figure out which structures could be recognized as historic, the city has to do a historic survey, and doing a survey takes time.

Delaney said that in their recent strategic plan, both Douglas County and the City of Lawrence committed to surveying all older buildings in their jurisdictions. The county has since completed all of the items on its list — but its list was smaller than the city’s and mostly includes sites in rural areas. Lawrence has many more places to survey, and Delaney said that puts the city very behind on its commitment.

“There’s a whole bunch of communities that remain to be surveyed,” Delaney said.

University Place, near the University of Kansas campus, is in the process of being surveyed, as are a group of sites connected to the founders of the local NAACP chapter. But other locations haven’t been as fortunate. East Lawrence, for instance, is one older neighborhood where “significant swaths” have not been surveyed, Delaney said.

Although there are some landmarks in East Lawrence that are on the historic register, some in the neighborhood are worried that the new land development code would leave many unrecognized historic buildings with little protection from being torn down and redeveloped. That’s a concern in University Place, too, where the neighborhood association has expressed fears that single-family homes were at risk of being bought up by out-of-town developers and redeveloped into student housing.

That’s where advocates hope the demolition moratoriums would help.

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Some of the moratorium proposals are directly tied to the historic surveying process. The Historic Resources Commission, for instance, wrote a letter to the City Commission requesting a moratorium for structures that are 50 years old or older if they are located in an area where a historic survey is scheduled to be conducted.

But in East Lawrence, where so many buildings remain to be surveyed and where no survey is currently taking place, the idea looks a bit different. Barry Shalinsky, the president of the East Lawrence Neighborhood Association, said a moratorium would give the neighborhood time not just to take stock of old buildings, but to determine what kinds of new developments might be appropriate for that part of town.

Barry Shalinsky

That’s the work that will happen once the city restarts the process for drafting the East Lawrence Neighborhood Plan in early 2025. Although it is not the same process as the historic survey, Shalinsky said the neighborhood plan would help outline future development, giving residents a say in “what they want to see” and what they feel is compatible with the neighborhood. Additionally, it could outline the need for historic protections at a time when “serviceable older buildings have been demolished” in East Lawrence, as he wrote in a letter to the HRC requesting the moratorium. Shalinsky said the “timeout” would help ensure “there’s an objective way to evaluate” development proposals.

The ELNA submitted its request to the Historic Resources Commission, which heard it on Thursday night. Zollner said that although the demolition moratorium requests would have to go through the City Commission to be approved, the HRC can comment to city commissioners about the validity of the request.

Even though the reasoning for the requests may be different for different neighborhoods, Delaney said the “underlying issues are the same” — pressure on redevelopment and a desire to protect historic structures.

Delaney noted that any moratorium would be a “stopgap” to protect historic structures and the feel of neighborhoods, and he has been urging the HRC to come up with a longer-range program to preserve older buildings until they have been surveyed. He said the Lawrence Preservation Alliance has offered to work with the city in completing the surveys, and the HRC has been working to come up with a schedule to plan out when neighborhood surveys would happen.

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With the work from both the HRC and other preservation groups, Delaney said it’s clear that many people in Lawrence are interested in making sure potentially historic buildings are protected before the possibility of tear-downs.

And that includes some interest on the City Commission, which would have the final say on any moratorium plan.

During the City Commission’s Nov. 19 meeting, Commissioner Brad Finkeldei voiced his support for the ideas, requesting that city staff draft ordinances for demolition moratoriums as the city completes historic surveys on University Place and NAACP founders’ sites.

Finkeldei was a member of the Land Development Code steering committee and voted to approve the sweeping document at the City Commission meeting on Nov. 12. He told the Journal-World that the moratoriums could provide balance when the changes take effect on April 1, 2025. Although he has heard from some builders that the new code might not change much, other community members are worried it could change “every neighborhood and block.” Approving a way to better protect places and structures could ease the uncertainty that some in the community are feeling, he said.

“I think making sure you protect historic places during that time can assuage fears,” Finkeldei said.

There’s also an issue of city resources, and how demolishing historic buildings might create more waste for the city or stifle creative new developments.

First, there’s the issue of the surveys themselves. Both of the historical surveys that are going on right now were something that the city had been planning for a while, Finkeldei said, and it’s important to ensure that the money and work the city puts into looking for potential historic designations does not go to waste.

Then, there’s the fact that development and historic preservation aren’t always mutually exclusive.

Zollner said that when a historic structure is identified, it doesn’t “freeze development” in place. The building at 619 E. Eight St. is designated as a historic landmark — it is listed as the Theo. Poehler Mercantile Company Wholesale Grocery Building. But people in Lawrence today might know it better as the Poehler Lofts housing development. Although the building has been re-used, the historic value of it is still preserved — and historic preservation tax credits were available for its redevelopment.

“It’s looking at how we grow and develop in a way that we don’t destroy something that is historically significant either for the architecture or cultural value in the city’s history,” Zollner said.

The new code will likely create changes in density and land use in Lawrence, even in historic areas. Zollner said that even in historically protected places, much of the work the HRC does is making sure its physical development aligns with the current historic character of the neighborhood. For example, for a new structure on a vacant lot, the new house must be set back like other homes and be similar in height and form. But it typically won’t be looking at whether that structure is a duplex or triplex based on the new code.

With the city’s two stated goals — adding more density and protecting historic neighborhoods — sometimes seemingly at odds, it can be tough to strike the right balance. City officials and preservation advocates hope to work together through both the issues, but Shalinsky said he thought caution would be the best solution to ensure the city doesn’t lose some of its historic resources to demolition.

“Once something is gone, it’s gone forever,” Shalinsky said.