arack Obama’s Blueprint for Change is a document that should resonate deeply with the historic preservation and rehabilitation communities. Why? Because it is grounded in the basic idea that we should be creating more livable and sustainable communities. Historic preservation, the original recycling, is by definition sustainable development.

 
Among its preservation-friendly features, Blueprint for Change:

• Calls for walkable cities and taking smart growth into account.  We face an epidemic of sprawl, and revitalizing our historic buildings and core neighborhoods is an obvious antidote.

• Promotes an increase in the supply of affordable housing.  America’s historic buildings provide many opportunities to house people of modest means; rehabilitating this historic housing stock with help from CDBG, Historic Tax Credits, Low-Income Tax Credits and other sources, remains one of the best solutions we have to the affordable housing crisis.

• Calls for establishing “Promise Neighborhoods” to bring a comprehensive strategy to fighting neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.  As a result of suburbanization and other trends, historic neighborhoods have a higher-than-average incidence of concentrated poverty, and strategies that leverage historic values are a component of a comprehensive program for revitalizing these neighborhoods.

• Promotes strategies to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.  Given the energy it takes to build new, using tools like the federal Historic Tax Credits to adaptively reuse older buildings is one of the best strategies we have for promoting energy efficient buildings.

• Recognizes that how communities are designed has a huge impact on health. Historic neighborhoods are invariably walkable, well designed and tend to be more racially, ethnically, educationally and economically diverse.

•  Promotes rural America and its economic development.  Heritage tourism and historic main streets have proven themselves as economic fundamentals of rural America.