Services / Historic preservation ordinances and guidelines
Making historic preservation more effective through clear ordinances and guidelines.
Historic protections keep a community's shared history standing for future generations while still allowing for progress. We write preservation ordinances and design guidelines that are clear, consistent, user-friendly, equitable, and defensible, and that advance your community's preservation goals.
Our approach
A preservation ordinance has to do two things at once: protect the historical, cultural, architectural, archaeological, and social heritage of a place, and remain workable for the people who own and maintain the buildings. Ordinances that are vague, punitive, or purely discretionary do neither. They invite conflict, they lose in court, and they lose public support.
Our team includes a former Chief Counsel who served as lead counsel for Cincinnati's award-winning Historic Preservation Ordinance, planners with preservation certificates, and designers who write guidelines people can actually follow. We work from the office at 1502 Vine Street, in the heart of the Over-the-Rhine Historic District, one of the largest intact historic districts in the country.
What we write
- Historic preservation ordinances: designation, certificates of appropriateness, demolition review, economic hardship, and enforcement
- Demolition-by-neglect provisions with clear standards and workable remedies
- Historic district design guidelines and development standards
- Preservation ordinance reviews and diagnostics
- Historic district standards integrated into zoning code rewrites
Example projects
- Cincinnati, Ohio Historic Preservation Ordinance, Cincinnati Preservation Association 2012 award winner
- Over-the-Rhine Historic District Guidelines (PDF)
- Burlington, Vermont Historic Preservation Ordinance review and diagnostic (PDF)
- Springfield, Massachusetts Historic Preservation Ordinance review and diagnostic
- Warrenton, Virginia demolition-by-neglect ordinance rewrite
- Canfield, Ohio historic district development standards
- Centerville, Ohio zoning code rewrite with preservation partners Gray & Pape, in a city with Ohio's largest collection of stone buildings
Not sure where to start?
Tell us what's not working in your code. We'll tell you what it would take to fix it, and what it would cost.