Sustainability and Historic Preservation with Cindy Olnick
With Cindy Olnick, https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindyolnick/
https://oembed.libsyn.com/embed?item_id=15722402
This week, we talk with Cindy Olnick to discuss how historical preservation is necessary and relevant today, along with explaining what preservation entails and how people can get involved.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Tim and Carolina meet with Cindy Olnick, the former head of communications for the LA Conservancy, to discuss the importance and relevance of historical preservation and what the preservation process is like. Cindy also opens up about her perspective on historical preservation and advises those who want to get involved.
Background Information
Cindy is on a mission to help save historic places by raising money, engaging supporters and mobilizing action by leveraging effective messaging. Her passion for architecture bleeds through in all of her work.
Cindy’s business is interesting during the pandemic crisis since the business is still pretty new. She left the Conservancy in 2018 and gave herself about six months to get up and running, which made everybody laugh because it turns out, it takes a while to start a business.
Her whole career MO has been getting jobs that don’t exist, and it takes a while; it took four years to get her last job. She has her own perspective and keeps putting one foot in front of the other. She has a range of projects, from running public engagement campaigns for historic places, writing messaging for people and doing grant proposals. She’s just trying to build capacity in the field of historic preservation by doing training sessions.
Some projects she worked on included editing for Angel City Press, working on the Bible of LA Architecture and working on the new version of the Good Part in Winter Guide. She has a positive outlook on her work, saying that it’s amazing how she gets to wake up and do something she loves and helping make the world a better place while doing it.
Because everything is virtual due to COVID, all the organizations are doing virtual events as they can’t get together in person. She is able to do her training, edits and paperwork all from home. While there are several positives about working from home, people shouldn’t forget that there are real places in the world.
The Rebuilding Processes
Carolina and Tim have been on a sustainability streak lately, so they have been interested in modular prefab.
Cindy sees preservation as a mix of old and new and would love to see existing places added onto and filled with modular prefab. People think that if you want historical preservation, you want to freeze buildings in time, put them under glass and everything should be in a museum. That’s not true.
Cindy wants to see creative solutions that involve new construction and modular (affordable, sustainable construction) integrated with historic places. It’s all about doing it well with sensitivity and with respect for what’s already there, but taking it in a new direction. If it’s built well, it will last.
Most people think about modular as being boxes that people crane in. Although that is somewhat true, really, it allows buildings to be built where it would be difficult to build. It also allows for faster construction and presents the opportunity to integrate more modern or contemporary designs, to either contextualize or contrast, depending on what the city allows.
When changes are made to a historic building, it’s typically good to do things that are reversible in some way. For example, if you redo a raised floor in a historic building, you put a platform over it instead of filling it with concrete, so someone can restore it to its original look in the future.
Nichiha, a company from Japan, has an ubiquitous presence and modular prefab history. He says that homes in Japan depreciate over 30 years and are usually torn down and rebuilt. But, in the last 10 years, they’ve been doing more preservation and more thinking ahead, asking how those spaces are made for the long term.
Another builder from Pittsburg, Module Housing, builds a small modular or panelized house that is oversimplified. However, it can be redesigned, as the roof is removable so that it can be sustainable long term.
Another example is the Emporium Building in San Francisco that was turned into a shopping mall. The builders kept the Beaux Arts facade and a glass dome, but gutted the inside. There is also a CVS in East LA that was a historic theater where the builders kept all of the details.
What is great about these buildings is that they are reversible. With buildings being reversible, they are more economically viable. The more flexible you make them, the more they can do whatever you need them to do.
Tax Credits
Tim heard about historical preservation tax credits on podcasts from people talking about how they developed a certain area and how a lot of their performance was based on the tax credits they were going to get. That makes it more amenable to the budget and carbon footprint where otherwise they would either have to pass on the project or spend the money on permits, fees and disposal costs to tear it down.
California got the first state historic tax credit last year. Although it wasn’t funded this year, there are federal rehab tax credits. There’s also a state historic building code that gives flexibility when rehabbing historic buildings. There’s more flexibility out there than people think, giving a whole new meaning to tenant improvement. Cindy thinks that waking up in a new cool place sets people up for a much better day. She posits that it’s important to have pretty things to look at.
Most developers want to do a good job with a project; they just don’t necessarily have all the information because those things can be hard to find.
Preservation consultants are out there to help developers, and they pave the way easier. They can help builders learn to reconstruct in ways that earn the tax credits.
Educational Opportunities
There are various classes, webinars and centers of information where people can go to learn more.
For quick, highly relevant information, Cindy recommends a preservation organization around their area as a good place to start. In California, the California Preservation Foundation h
as state-wide educational webinars, workshops about tax credits, classes on following the secretary standards for rehab, plus information on all of the technical things involved in actually getting these projects done.
City-wide, there are many options in California. The Los Angeles Conservancy, Hollywood Heritage, and the Santa Monica Conservancy all are great options. She recommends getting as local as possible, then reaching out. Preservation organizations love it when developers want to do the right thing, but they need help. They’re just standing by waiting for your call.
The Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board is really involved with Modernism Week. They’ve done a good job of preserving mid-century modern homes in the form of an office, a business or single-family homes. Then, they made a pitch about the contractors or developers who would make the same amount of money or more remodeling these homes, as opposed to going through the process of demolishing a building. They also found out there was a higher loan to value for people to access the funds and equity and be able to do the remodel than to try and raise money through normal builder sources that knockdown and build something new. There are options in every state for these societies.
There are private nonprofits, but there are also state historic preservation offices that are part of the government that are heavily involved in reviewing projects that get tax credits. Section 106 of the National Preservation Act is one of these things that consulting firms will help developers navigate.
The state historic preservation office is another resource, and there’s also the national trust for historic preservation. Savingplaces.org has a ton of resources, and they are also doing a great job of following legislative issues and doing education around that. There are webinars about the Cares Act and The Great Outdoors Act, so there is plenty of information if you look.
There are also a couple of movies that educate people about preservation:
Although Cindy is not big into movies, she mentions that many preservation groups do film series and film festivals specifically about this topic. It’s neat to see historical places come up in films and recognizing them. The conservancy gave a preservation award one year to Mad Men for raising the profile of mid-century architecture. The creator of Mad Men, Matt Weiner, had to shoot the series in LA because New York’s structures were gone. They also gave an award to The Young and the Restless for having a whole storyline about preservation.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was on a podcast that Tim listened to, and they discussed what it was like to try and save that house, get an owner who would buy it and invest in it instead of tearing it down. It reached the younger generations, too.
Speaking about the younger generations, they care about preservation and the nostalgia of historic architecture. However, they don’t call it preservation; they call it heritage conservation. One of Cindy’s fellow Conservancy members saw these 20-year old Snapchat employees in a Koreatown tour. The Conservancy member asked why they were interested in that, and they replied that because they were dealing with numbers all day, they wanted something real and of some authenticity. People see buildings with souls, and young people connect with that.
Carolina recently posted the house from Back to the Future, and so many young kids connected because the movie is a classic. The LA Conservancy ran the movie in their film series, and to much acclaim. Tim’s daughter and her friends love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Although these aren’t new movies, the younger generations connect to it, and that is what it is all about.
Giving Back and Getting Involved
If you have money to spare, every neighborhood and every community has historic places. Even if they’re not a hundred years old, they’re places that are important to the people who live there.
The preservation field is getting much more into cultural significance and places that aren’t necessarily architectural but are full of meaning. Taking care of your house if it is old and getting involved with the local government supports the industry. Sign up for emails for advocacy groups, show up to hearings, write letters, patronize these places, do virtual tours, volunteer, research, post on social media about old places and get conversations going. Donate money and time when you can.
Cindy got involved and had many mentors over the years in different ways. From communications mentors to career mentors, and in terms of preservation, it was there. She describes that when she was a kid playing with Barbies, she would spend all day just setting up the house.
When she went to college, she enrolled in architecture but did not have the talent, so she went into communications. She realized that she loved all places and could contribute to this field by using communication, messaging and writing skills. There are a lot of different ways that people can contribute.
One of Cindy’s mentors, Linda Dishman, gave her a chance at the Conservancy. Another mentor was Christy McAvoy, who co-founded Hollywood Heritage and founded Historic Resources Group. If you look around at the people you are working with or have worked for, you will realize that everybody’s inspiring you in one way or another.
Cindy encourages anybody who has anything to do with building or maintaining or rehabbing structures to consider the potential of places that already exist. Don’t write them off because you never know. It isn’t always about the money. There’s such potential for integrating interesting, authentic places with really cool stories.
Carolina loved Cindy’s book, Lost and Almost Lost. Cindy was on the board of Photo Friends of the Los Angeles Public Library, which is a nonprofit that helps promote the library’s fantastic photograph collection. The board members were tasked years ago with writing books because they started this low-cost publication program, just as a way to get the photos out into the universe.
Each board member took their area of expertise and wrote a book. They wanted her to do a book about lost buildings, and she said she’d do it if there could be some happy endings, talking about the fact that things are preserved, and it doesn’t just happen. It’s an easy read with lots of photos, and it talks about things that she’s lost and things saved. The proceeds from her book go to Photo France.
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this week’s episode! Shoot us an email at buildperspectives@gmail.com.
To contact Cindy or to get the book:
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