Infill & Teardown Statistics in FXBG

City of Fredericksburg Planning staff made a  presentation at the August 28, 2024 meeting of the Planning Commission on the amount of infill development and teardowns in town over the past few years (a copy of staff’s memo and presentation is available at the end of this post). HFFI was pleased to see that City staff conducted such an analysis and hopes they will continue to keep the public informed on this matter – as it provides insight into potential gentrification and loss of historic housing in some of the City’s older established neighborhoods.  HFFI’s public comments read at the meeting are provided below.

The Historic Fredericksburg Foundation has reviewed the upcoming agenda for the August 28, 2024, meeting of the Planning Commission and submits the following comments on select items: 

Discussion of Potential Policies, Ordinances or Applications: Item 5.A. Analysis of Tear Down and Infill Housing

HFFI is pleased to see staff’s assessment of recent teardowns and infill development and are thrilled to see the long-standing historic trend of infilling vacant lots continue in our community. We also understand that the demolition and replacement of some older buildings is necessary for the continued growth and development of the city. The buildings constructed today and those erected decades ago will not last forever. Regardless, what we choose to preserve and what we discard is a direct reflection of our culture and community values.

The adaptive re-use and rehabilitation of existing buildings is important for many reasons, some of which are not commonly known.

• Environmental Benefits: Reusing buildings and making them more energy efficient plays an essential role in meeting our community’s goals for sustainability, resilience, and climate action. Modernizing existing buildings greatly reduces greenhouse gases by keeping many tons of material out of landfills and reducing the need for new construction, which typically generates far more carbon emissions than conservation and reuse.
• Economic Benefits: Repairing, reusing, and renovating historic places keeps money in the local economy by spending more on labor than materials compared to new construction, and employing local laborers. Furthermore, the rehabilitation of older buildings gives property owners a marketing edge—with buyers paying a premium for the resource’s unique features and stories.
• Health & Well-Being Benefits: Older places also support our emotional and psychological health in multiple ways. We form strong emotional bonds with the places that helped shape us or that provide the backdrop for our daily lives, and we take comfort in their familiarity. Older and historic places remind us that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, connecting us with our past and with each other, while fostering a sense of belonging and pride of place in our community.
• Blight Reduction Benefits: Reviving vacant and underused buildings, maintaining older multifamily housing, and adding compatible new construction in older neighborhoods can add density and vitality to a community while keeping what makes it unique.
• Affordability Benefits: Most of the country’s existing affordable rental housing is unsubsidized, privately owned, and at risk. New construction can’t keep up with demand, and the vast majority of new construction isn’t affordable to low- and middle-income residents. Rehabilitating our existing housing stock keeps these buildings safe and maintains greater affordability at a fraction of the cost of new construction.

Infilling vacant lots is the most organic way a city grows new built resources. The other way involves the demolition and replacement of older structures or buildings of lesser market value. While HFFI is pleased staff’s study highlights just four of the 14 new houses in 2024 resulted in the demolition of older buildings, it is both common sense and proven fact that vacant lots are low hanging fruit. As time goes on, Fredericksburg neighborhoods will increasingly lose their older, smaller, and more affordable housing.

The fact that new buildings raise the property value of the existing parcel is made clear in staff’s analysis. This infill will also impact the value of neighboring properties—good news to many homeowners whose residence is likely their largest financial asset. Sprinkled across the city in various neighborhoods, incremental increases in property value enhance the wealth of our community slowly over time. However, such changes also increase property taxes—impacting some people and neighborhoods at higher rates than others. Given Fredericksburg’s ongoing challenges of affordability, rising cost of living, and the forecasted growth in renter-occupied houses, investor-driven rapid growth in our older established neighborhoods can only exacerbate these issues.

Preservation isn’t the sole solution to pressing local issues, but we can’t solve them without it. We can’t build our way out of the housing crisis or bulldoze our way out of climate change. We need to use every tool we have, including our existing places and infrastructure.

Hired consultants and planning experts like Streetsense and Heritage Arts have repeatedly advocated for increasing local preservation incentives—a priority task for City Council since 2021—to encourage the conservation and rehabilitation of our existing housing stock. We can support preservation and new development simultaneously—it is not either or, it’s both.

HFFI hopes that the Planning Commission and City staff will continue to assess the quality of infill and impacts of teardowns in the City, sharing these statistics regularly with the public to monitor character loss and any rise in gentrification. We further urge Planning Commissioners to support the expansion of preservation incentives to retain and rehabilitate our unique, authentic, historic, and most affordable housing assets.