By Elizabeth Turnbull

It was a quiet victory. Last year, Capitol Hill’s Millionaire’s Row neighborhood, which spans from 14th Ave E to Volunteer Park, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places — a designation that has brought a greater sense of importance to the street.

It was also part of an increasingly questioned movement to win protections and historic designations for certain areas and blocks of Seattle, raising questions about equity in a city struggling with rising costs and increased displacement.

In Wallingford, a fight over preservation has surfaced before any designation could be put in place in an area of the neighborhood that includes some 600 single family homes. The concern? Historic designations can be used as justification for restrictions on growth in a neighborhood:

That played out in January of 2019, when Seattle’s Ravenna-Cowen neighborhood acquired a National Register listing for over 440 homes within its boundaries. A month later, Seattle City Council approved an amendment to remove the neighborhood from the list of urban villages upzoned under its Mandatory Housing Affordability regulations.

To oppose a designation, a majority of the property owners in the district must provide their signatures against the designation and provide proof that they are legal property owners in the district. In addition, only property owners can object—not renters or residents that do not own the building. On top of this, until recently, homeowners had to submit notarized letters of objection.

When it comes to general consensus, it is much harder to oppose a designation than to win one.

“It just seems really inequitable, and tilts everything in favor of having these things designated,” the anonymous housing advocate behind the widely followed Pushing The Needle @pushtheneedle social media account tells CHS. “And not letting anybody say, ‘I don’t think that that’s fair.’”

The National Register designation comes at a federal level and it recognizes properties that are associated with important events, the lives of significant people or a specific type of construction — to be included, these properties generally must be at least 50 years old and similar to how they were in the past.

For Millionaire’s Row, the designation encompasses houses that were built within a 65 year time frame—from 1902 until 1967, according to Michael Houser, a state architectural historian. The designation is considered honorary, meaning there are no protections against demolition or additions to the properties, instead, these stipulations are controlled at a local level.

At the same time, the designation’s “honorary” title may not be entirely accurate since certain incentives such as eligibility for facade easement, eligibility for grants-in-aid and the historic rehabilitation tax credit—which allows owners and some lessees to take a 20% income tax credit on rehabilitation costs—come along with the designation.

CHS reached out to the organizers behind the Millionaire’s Row designation in recent weeks to hear their perspective on the concerns around equity but did not get a response.

But in 2019, we talked with members of the group about their hopes for designation. At the time, they were adamant the quest was not about anti-development efforts. “This isn’t any kind of stealth reaction against the city’s density,” one organizer told CHS. “The National Registry has no effect on what can be built. But as the city changes, it’s also important not to forget its history either, and that’s the whole purpose of the nomination.”

A few of the homes on Millionaire’s row have historical landmark protections at the city level. Both the Bordeaux House and Moore Mansion are designated as City of Seattle Landmarks, according to a spokesperson with the city.

Buildings that are landmarked by the city have substantially more protections and advantages than houses that are simply recognized on the national register. These benefits include zoning code relief, building code relief, special tax valuations and incentives for downtown landmarks.

Certain groups such as Wallingford For All, a group under the Share The Cities organization, are trying to push back on efforts to implement historic districts and landmarking. The groups say they are concerned that designations at the national and local level may result in exclusionary housing practices in the community, such as efforts to avoid upzoning.

A city representative for the landmarks process said there is no direct relationship between the federal historic designation and the city’s requirements, but he added it is possible that “an individual Board member may consider [a national register designation] as helpful to their decision making.”

Since 1970, Seattle has also established eight districts that locally protect historic structures in commercial areas that don’t typically include single family style homes. The Pike/Pine Conservation District was designed to also protect the neighborhood’s history by creating development incentives for projects that preserved the facades of the area’s auto row structures.

In regards to creating more multifamily zoning in the city, Wallingford For All, voiced concerns on their website that after events in 2019, when the Ravenna-Cowen neighborhood was removed from the Roosevelt Urban Village a month after becoming a national historic district, the same thing might occur in other neighborhoods as well.

After the city council ruled in favor of removing Ravenna Cowen from the urban village, hundreds of single-family homes in the area avoided upzoning.

That kind of restriction only adds to the ongoing challenges of the Mandatory Housing Affordability effort’s focus of increasing density in Seattle by only upzoning its densest neighborhoods.

Aside from questions surrounding zoning changes, many argue that preserving old city neighborhoods isn’t inherently a bad thing and can be motivated by good intentions.

Laura Loe, executive director of Share The Cities said Seattle faces a conundrum of maintaining architecture versus advocating for the city as a whole and examining the implications of national and citywide designations and decisions.

“Everyone thinks they’re the hero of their story,” Loe said. “Everyone thinks they’re doing good.”

You can learn more about the neighborhood at millionairesrow.net.

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