It's binding the hands of future generations. Once something is designated a historic, it's hard to undo, even if the opportunity cost tomorrow is much higher than it is today.

It's also cumulative. There is a finite amount of land. If you designate another 1% of it as historic each year, a hundred years later you're locked in stasis.

There is a reason for the rule against perpetuities.

If you destroy something today, you have also binded the hands of a future generation who will never get to enjoy it. Most of the popular vacation places in the world are historic/old sites. If we tear down everything old to put up cheaper, more efficient buildings are we necessarily better off?

If we took things to the absolute extreme and tore it all down? Yes we would be better off. I don't think the current value of historic sites outweighs the deadweight. This is coming from a North American perspective though.

It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.

You are right that this is a very American perspective. Maybe we could learn something from societies that have been around much longer and tend to care more about their past.

==It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.==

Or they have historical value specifically because they were built to last. Obviously, we wouldn’t know that unless we allow them to last.

Caring about the past is not the same as paying for the upkeep of a historic museum that costs as much as 3 museums when the historic museum was actually kind of a dump. The status quo is goddamned rediculous.

If I had to choose my position it would be less broad protection of historic buildings. However if I have to choose one extreme or the other I see homelessness exploding where I live and a bunch of money spent on bullshit. We're not talking about preserving the Sistine Chapel here.

> Most of the popular vacation places in the world are historic/old sites.

No, they're the remains of historic/old sites that were left after people of yore tore down everything else to build anew.

You don't have to preserve 100% of the "old city" to get a glimpse into an era, just like you don't have to preserve 100% of the city wall just to show that once upon a time, city walls were a thing.

> If we tear down everything old to put up cheaper, more efficient buildings are we necessarily better off?

You don't have to tear down everything in San Francisco, but most of it has little to no "historic value".

Not everything is about San Francisco, even if HN wants to think otherwise. Plenty of other cities have historic buildings with their own value, Chicago bungalows are an example. They represent a point in time and are still viable structures for today’s families.

Places like Cinque Terra, Istanbul and Cartagena are popular specifically because they have been preserved and are not just remains.

> Not everything is about San Francisco, even if HN wants to think otherwise.

Perhaps, but if we're talking about bulldozing and rebuilding the place to get rent down, San Francisco is at the top of the list.

Or you could build higher. For reference, San Fran has 26 skyscrapers and 900k people. Chicago has 123 skyscrapers and 2.7 million people.

> It's binding the hands of future generations.

That's true in the sense the statement is true of every human action.

> Once something is designated a historic, it's hard to undo

Only because there is widespread support for the general idea of historical preservation; it's usually not more difficult than reverding or passing a normal law to either eliminate a particular designation or an entire system of historic preservation.

People who find it difficult do so not because their hands are tied by the past, but because their hands are tied by their present opposition.

Once something is designated as historic, it's exactly as easy or hard to undo as the future generations want it - you're not binding their hands; you're binding hands of this generation so that the next ones can make the choice whether to continue preserving that particular thing or not.

Once something is destroyed, though, that is impossible to undo, no matter what the future generations would want.

> Once something is designated as historic, it's exactly as easy or hard to undo as the future generations want it - you're not binding their hands; you're binding hands of this generation so that the next ones can make the choice whether to continue preserving that particular thing or not.

In exactly the same sense you're not binding current generations either.

The issue is that it's a lot easier to get something designated as historical than to get it undesignated as such or to change the process in order to make it easier.

Moreover, changing it is hard because it's a complicated issue that the large majority of people don't really care about and a concentrated special interest group (landlords who want to retain high rents) does care about and doesn't want changed.

Unless you expect that dynamic to change significantly over time, you're binding the future as much as the present.

> Once something is destroyed, though, that is impossible to undo, no matter what the future generations would want.

That is true of all action and inaction. You can't change the past once it has already happened.

You have to choose for them whether the future gets the old buildings or the new buildings. If it turns out the old buildings are worse, e.g. because continued high rents cause lasting economic damage to the region, you can't undo that either.

I tend to agree, but this assumes that the thing preserved will be valued going forward. If someone's fundament values are not such that they see any benefit in preservation of an old statehouse or whatever, this won't be a compelling argument.