Column: Whither Greenwich’s Historic Homes?

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By Mark Pruner
Dashboard Editor

RE-Dashboard-map-2-19Last year thousands of residents marched in a parade and lined Greenwich Avenue to celebrate the town’s 375th anniversary. We have a lot of history here in town, but every year we lose some of it forever as historic homes are torn down.

In 2015 we had 652 houses sold through the Greenwich MLS. Of those 652 houses, only two were built in the 1700’s and another 20 were built in the 1800’s. Several of those 22 homes are no longer with us or soon won’t be. So only 3 percent of sales last year were pre-20th century. (Interestingly, more than double that number, or 46 homes, were built between 1900 and 1916, making them over 100 years old and hence antiques by my definition.)

In the abstract, I think most people would like to preserve our history. As Gideon Fountain, who bought and preserved an old home on Riverside Avenue, said, an antique home is not like an antique car that you can admire and take for a drive on a few sunny days each year. People live in antique homes.

When you talk about antique homes, it’s a very broad category. Last year the 22 antique homes built before 1900 ranged in price from a $360,000 house in Byram built in 1898 to a $26 million house in Belle Haven built in 1885. These houses range from some of our most gracious homes to houses that fit the classic definition of a tear down.

Among the 46 homes sold last year that were built from 1900 to 1916, many were designed for large families of moderate income with multiple small bedrooms, low ceilings and often no family room. Some of these houses should be preserved too, but they don’t tug at heartstrings the way watching a classic Colonial house, not a 1950’s Colonial-style house, but a real Colonial getting bulldozed does. You feel like you’ve lost something forever. Preserving these houses is expensive, so we have to decide what we want to preserve.

But just what does preserving mean? If you look at the pictures of the 22 pre-1900 houses sold last year, you would be hard put to guess that around half of them are really antique homes. Walls have been opened up, floors have been tiled, finishes have been changed and additions have been put on. The result is a house that has little historic feel to it. At the same time, many of the antique houses sold last year do have some of the feel and character of the houses with original flooring, large fireplaces and classic styling.

A drama is playing out right now on Clapboard Ridge Road, where a truly historic house built in 1840 has a demolition permit on it. The Benjamin Reynolds House, aka Hobby Horse Farm, sold for $8.75 million last year. The house had been on and off the market going all the way back to 2010, indicative of both the price and the limited number of buyers in today’s market for historic homes. The buyer has proposed splitting the 4.7 acre lot in a two-acre zone in two and building a modern house on the other lot while moving the historic home to the new lot.

The problem is the lot-split. As you often see with higher-quality houses from the pre-zoning era, there is an old deed restriction on subdividing land. There are a lot of these restrictive covenants in deeds on properties in Greenwich, as people tried to put in place private restrictions on surrounding lots to control what would be developed around them. These types of restrictive covenants run with the land usually require that every other property that has the restrictive covenant agree to waive the covenant. Too often, a single person can prevent what the majority and often everyone but that one person wants, which is one reason why towns adopted zoning controls. The state should consider a change that makes voiding the restriction a majority rule.

So what else can we to do to preserve our historic homes that still feel historic? The Greenwich Historical Society and its chair, Davidde E. Strackbein, work diligently to preserve our history. They have the Preservation Network headed by Diane Fox to educate residents on the value of preservation. Robin Kencel, a realtor here at Douglas Elliman, heads the Landmark Recognition Program, which is always looking for property owners who would like their historic house plaqued. A sister organization, the Greenwich Preservation Trust, headed by Jo Conboy, works to purchase historic properties and works with owners on creative ways to preserve historic properties.

At the town level, we have demolition posting requirements on older homes that can delay demolition while interested parties try to work out a way to preserve these historic houses. P&Z also has a historic district and a historic overlay, but few properties have elected to use these options.

We can build more flexibility into our planning and zoning and regulations. One of the interesting things about many of these houses is that, over the years, they’ve had a wide variety of purposes, from farmhouses with large families to rental properties owned by widows to houses for empty nesters. If we want to preserve these properties, we need to make it as easy as possible for new owners to fix up the properties for today’s lifestyle while still preserving much of the historic character of the property.

We can do this by making setbacks and other requirements more flexible for these properties, since they often either weren’t built in the center of the property or over the years, as surrounding properties were split off, now sit right next to a subdivision property line created before today’s zoning rules were adopted. In our higher density zones, we can allow for additional FAR for these houses, which may be over the limits, or allow for a modern addition that can be tastefully done without changing the character of the rest of the house New Canaan and Westport have taken these approaches. 

Another thing that we realtors can do is to coordinate the marketing of some of these historic homes. There are people who seek out historic homes with character, and according to Dancy Cassell of Ogilvy and Associates, there seems to be a slight upturn in the number of buyers looking for these types of houses. Some joint marketing might be appropriate to reach out to these buyers.

Any time you put restrictions on houses, though, it’s going to reduce their value. I don’t believe we should force historic preservation on owners and make them suffer the diminution in the value of their property that can occur with blanket regulations. At the same time, we need to do everything we can to encourage owners to preserve these houses and for buyers to want to continue to maintain these houses once purchased. Because the present protection system is essentially permanent, one way to encourage more people to elect these protections is to make it possible to have historic designations removable with certain penalties or hearing requirements.

The town should also step up if they think it’s important to preserve Greenwich’s history. If an owner wants to designate their house as a historic house, then the town should give them a partial or full tax abatement. For less than a million dollars we could preserve a lot of historic houses.

Now, whenever you do this, the devil is in the details. Just how historic does a house have to be before it qualifies? We do have an Architectural Review Board that might want to take on this responsibility in consultation with the Greenwich Historical Society.  If we wait too long, there may be little to save.

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Mark Pruner is a real estate agent at Douglas Elliman in Greenwich. He is the creator of GreenwichStreets.com, a blog focusing on Greenwich and the real estate market.

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