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Collegiate’s Property Problems

by Theresa Fritz Camoriano (8-13-01)

Collegiate is a school near downtown Louisville, which had purchased some properties adjacent to the school in order to give itself room for expansion.  However, now that it wants to tear down the buildings on those adjacent properties to make room for its expansion, it is being prevented from doing so by a historic preservation committee.  The historic preservation folks appear to be sticking to their guns, saying that, if you allow one historic building to be torn down, you are setting a bad precedent.  What neither side of the argument is saying, and what needs to be said loudly and clearly, is that neither Collegiate nor any other property owner should have to ask permission from anyone to tear down its own buildings.  When you fork over your cash to buy property, part of what you are supposed to be buying is the right to tear down what is built on the property and build what you want.  If the historic preservation folks don’t want the buildings to be torn down, they should buy the property – not use regulations to steal property rights from the property owner.

Throughout our history, all kinds of unpopular and politically powerless people have been able to succeed and thrive thanks to respect for private property.  You did not have to be politically powerful in order to own and control property, and this has enabled immigrants and other people who were completely outside of the mainstream to have their own homes and businesses, to trade, to live, to raise families, to build beautiful historic buildings, and to create a thriving and healthy environment for us all.  But today, many of us take the benefits of property rights for granted and are willing to give them up, ironically, in the interest of “preserving our heritage”.

It is very easy for the historic preservation folks to say that the historic character of the neighborhood should be preserved at all costs, when they are shifting all of those costs onto the property owner and bear none of the costs themselves.  The Courier-Journal says that historic commissions should have the right to control the property (meaning to steal the owner’s property rights), but, in this case, it thinks that the theft is not a good idea, because the school is a good neighbor, and it may well be forced to move to the suburbs if it is not allowed to expand.  However, once you accept the premise that it is alright to steal property rights from the rightful property owner and give them to a historic commission or a zoning board, you have set up the unfair and unjust situation in which Collegiate finds itself.

What incentives do the historic preservation people have to permit Collegiate to tear down its own buildings?  None, unless someone offers them a nice bribe.  Unlike the property owner, they bear none of the costs of preserving the old buildings.  The historic preservation committee does not have to pay the maintenance costs on the property, it does not have to pay the utility bills or the property taxes, and it does not feel the pinch of being unable to expand to meet the needs of its customers.  Being freed from all the risks and obligations of property ownership, the historic preservation folks can be pure of heart as they simply pursue their noble goal of preserving the historic character of the neighborhood.  They don’t think of themselves as common thieves, stealing the property rights from the property owner.  Instead, they hold their heads high and think of themselves as being very noble protectors of the neighborhood’s historic character.

If you were Collegiate, what would you do?  One possible course for Collegiate is to allow those properties to deteriorate until there is nothing left to do but to tear them down.  This may take a while, and it may create an eyesore and even a hazard, which probably will not be to the liking of the historic preservation committee, but it has to be an attractive alternative for the property owner.  Or, if Collegiate doesn’t want to wait for the buildings to fall apart, it might just sell or abandon its entire property and move to the suburbs, where no regulatory commission will tie its hands and prevent it from doing what it needs to do in order for the school to meet the needs of its students.  (So, of course, the historic preservation folks are promoting “urban sprawl”, which, no doubt, they also find very distasteful.)  Either of these alternative courses impoverishes both the community and Collegiate and does not maintain the historic character of the neighborhood, but, alas, that is what happens when the control over the property is stolen from the owner and given to someone who has no personal, financial interest in the property.

Perhaps Collegiate, being an exclusive school, has friends, such as The Courier-Journal, who are politically powerful enough to arrange for an exception to be made on its behalf. (Editor’s note:  By the time this article was published, that is exactly what had happened, with Collegiate receiving a “hardship exception”.)  But what if Collegiate were a school that taught unconventional ideas that were not popular with those in power?  And what about other property owners who are not so well-connected?  Should there be one set of rules for the politically well-connected and another for the regular folks? 

I leave you with the words of Adolph Hitler:

I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the principle: the common good takes precedence over self-interest. But the state must retain control and each property owner should consider himself an agent of the state. . . . The Third Reich will always retain the right to control the owners of property.