I'm pretty gung-ho for preservation. My sense of the demolition situation here is generally in line with what ghettopalmetto wrote above.

I recently bought a cute little old house. It burned down. I've been deconstructing it, to pull out as much of the wood as I can before hiring someone to excavate the foundation etc. Every few days I discover another thing that would have made renovating that house to the standard I had imagined pointless, difficult, or expensive. This weekend, I found a section of floor where someone had used a stack of paperback books to flatten things out before laying linoleum over it all. I tel this story to illustrate the fact that even if someone wants to renovate a house, and it looks by all appearances to be in pretty good shape, there will be countless little challenges.


I wonder how much the city could save on demo costs, in the long run, if there was a very quick and effective process for having a house boarded up. Imagine a situation where you can call the city's "open building" hotline and get a crew out to do a thorough board-up in the next 24-48 hours. I think a lot of the push for demo by people who aren't developers comes from a sense of helplessness about the building next door going to shit. Unless there's an actual visible crime being committed, you can't get much of an official response until the thing is on fire or ready to be torn down. I think this leads to frustration, a sense of that demolition is inevitable, and thus an emphasis on demolition as the answer.


I suppose, with the DLB auctions, the city is starting to do this -- it's their property, so they're protecting it. But maybe the pre-foreclosure triage option could involve boarding up and securing other people's property, before it goes to shit.