[MassHistPres] Historic buildings and code

[james hadley]

This is a sad story. It sounds like a question for The Ethicists at the NY Times Magazine. (Formerly is was just The Ethicist, but now it a group discussion.)
It seems that perhaps the scope was not sufficiently vetted - there are a number of repairs that are NOT included in the cost trigger to bring a building into compliance, and as I recall, roof repair is one of those. But the code is changing so often today that my information may be out of date.
James Hadley
Former Chair, Orleans Historical Commission.

From: slater at alum.rpi.edu
To: masshistpres at cs.umb.edu
Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 08:39:04 -0700
Subject: [MassHistPres] Historic buildings and code



St. Jude’s (aka St. Aloysius) church in Springfield was built in 1874. It was hit by a microburst in 2011 and was closed due to damage to the roof.  Engineers hired by the church found that some structural beams were cracked and some of the masonry was also damaged. 





The church did not spec out the cost to repair just the damage - the engineering firm advised them that they would have to bring the entire building into compliance with building and handicapped accessibility code. The cost would have been $3.1 million to do this. They said that this was due to the fact that the entire roof structure would need to be removed, making the work area %” (a 50% work area triggers the full upgrade, and work that costs more than 30% of the assessed value triggers the ADA code upgrade, which would have included elevators).





The engineering firm appeared before the Springfield historical commission to justify a waiver of our Demolition Delay Ordinance. Here is what disturbed me: the engineer stated that even if they could have gotten a waiver or “looked the other way” and structured the project to not trigger a full upgrade, he said that he would not do this. He brought up an example of a school in upstate NY that did this and was subsequently damaged in a microburst, he claimed 15 children died (though I can find no record of this). 





The engineer also stated that he advises all his clients to stay away from older buildings, especially masonry, because they are so expensive to bring up to code and he does not consider them safe until they are updated. He basically painted all older buildings as inadequate because they did not use modern materials or techniques.





A member of the public, speaking out, called his bluff a bit, saying that if what the engineer said was true, nearly every single church in the city should be immediately closed because they are dangerous. However the impact of the argument was effective – the SHC voted 3-1 to immediately lift the demo delay; the church will be demolished. They will rebuild a smaller church for the $1.1 million in insurance that they received, a building that will likely be hard-pressed to last more than 50 years (since that it the threshold they build to these days).





My question is, how do we counter something like this? This is not the first time we have “had to” demolish an older building because the cost to bring it up to code exceeded its value (remember, Springfield has far lower property values than Eastern MA – for example, there is a 12-unit brick apartment building on the market right now for $425k).  There is a pervasive and growing attitude that “older” means “obsolete” and should be cleared out whenever possible, even when nothing new is built in its place.





Ralph Slate


Springfield Historical Commission





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