[MassHistPres] Time to move a historic structure

[Amy D. Finstein]

Dear Michael,

Framingham recently had a situation that is relevant to your question re:
the timeline for a demolition delay. We had an 18th century historic house,
not in a historic district, that was slated for demolition. Our Historical
Commission implemented a 1-year demolition delay, and the Historic District
Commission started to pursue the creation of a single-building historic
district to protect the house. The owner was not in support -- he wanted to
tear it down, subdivide the lot, and build new houses. After approaching
City Council with our proposed new district (which we had to do to get the
process started), we opted for a collaborative negotiation between the
City, the city's legal counsel, the historic district commission, and the
owner, whereby we worked out a legally binding agreement that extended the
demolition delay while the owner worked to try to sell the historic house
parcel separately... affording him his end goal of a financial return on
his investment in the property; and our goal of saving the house and
finding an owner who would maintain the house and who would support its
eventual inclusion in an historic district. I am pleased to say that this
indeed came to pass, and the house recently passed into new hands; the
previous owner is now free to build on the remaining portion of the lot
that he kept; and the house will be in a new historic district once that
motion comes before City Council in the coming weeks.

This was a very complicated situation, and one in which the "threat" of an
historic district was our only possible way of changing the Demolition
Delay timeline. (This is not something that we particularly wanted to do in
such a reactive way... but again, it was our only avenue here) Since
Framingham is now a city with a City Council, we were fortunate with the
timeframe of City Council meetings where they could take action on this
fairly quickly -- this had not been the case with town meeting, which met
infrequently and likely would not have been able to act on this quickly
enough.

Hope that this is helpful fodder for the mill.
Very best,
Amy Finstein
Historic District Commission
Framingham, MA


On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 10:33 AM Roughan, Michael <
Michael.Roughan at hdrinc.com> wrote:

> First, let me thank all of the respondents to my request for info on
> streetscape. I received a wealth of information.
>
>
>
> Hopkinton is attempting to extend our demo delay from 6 months to 18
> months. One rationale is to have time to get a single structure historic
> district enabled but the second rationale is to relocate the historic
> structure to a different lot. We had this specific issue with a great
> Italianate 2 story structure that was in the way of our library expansion.
> We actually had a developer who was interested in buying the house ($1) and
> relocating it to a vacant no-conforming lot but could not get the
> appropriate permits in line before the delay timed out.
>
>
>
> Does anyone have a timeline for a successful relocation of an historic
> structure they could share?
>
>
>
> ….Mike
>
>
>
> Michael Roughan, AIA, EDAC, LEED AP, ACHA
>
> Chairman - Hopkinton Historical Commission
>
>
>
> Town of Hopkinton
>
> 18 Main Street
>
> Hopkinton, MA 01748
>
>
> *D* 617.357.7725 *M* 617.784.6463
>
>
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> MassHistPres at cs.umb.edu
> http://mailman.cs.umb.edu/listinfo/masshistpres
>
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