Here in the UK if a building is old and has value as part of our heritage then it becomes a listed building and is protected. Why don't communitys have the same protection? For example a famous community are the east of London cockney. They have their own lingo, some very bad old songs etc. However, over the last few generation the east end of london has become a melting pot of a multi-nationalitys. This has happened to such an extent that you could say the cockney is now extinct. My question is, if the cockney (or any other traditional community) were a building it would be protect by law. Surely, the heritage within the people is far more important that a building, why isn't it protected?
Maybe the answer is obvious, and I'm just missing it Just to help me get a handle on the nature of your question, how, exactly, would you go about protecting a community as such?
The community is comprised of people and people are sovereign. The law is prohibited from treating them the way it treats artifacts and possessions. What are you going to do? Tell people that they can't allow members of other social classes, ethnic groups or regions choose to become their neighbors? That they must continue speaking the argot of their grandparents while the rest of the anglophone peoples steadily level their speech toward one easily intercomprehensible standard dialect? That they have to keep eating the foods they were served as children, playing the games their parents taught them, having the jobs (or unemployment) that their ancestors held, and generally remaining static denizens of a past era, going into a rapid worldwide Paradigm Shift toward an information-, telecommuting-, and leisure-based economy that could make the Iron Age and the Industrial Revolution look like rehearsals?
would that mean they could never move out of their community? And if they did they could only sell their house to certain people to keep their community culturaly pure?
And how would this enforcement of cultural purity make the transition to the Post-Industrial Era? Most of us in the West, and many in other parts of the world, spend a significant part of our lives in virtual communities. We contaminate each other's culture with our foreign ideas and opinions. I suppose you would have to outlaw the internet, something they haven't even been able to do in China and Iran.
I have often wondered about declaring some building or art work to be historically valuable. Who pays if the owner wants to sell such an item? Does he lose out in such a situation? In my area, there have been objections to selling art work and removing it from our city because it was considered part of our cultural heritage. Similarly, there have been objections to demolishing some old house & building a high rise on the ground. An owner of a valuable building or art item stands to lose a lot of money if the government or some body else is not willing to pay for the building or art item.
Three guesses. You got it in one. In San Francisco, and perhaps other cities, easement law has been used. Preservation societies pay the owner of a property for an easement, which gives them certain rights. Unlike the textbook style of easement, which is simply permission to walk or drive across someone else's land, a preservation easement gives the society the right to stop the owner from destroying the historically valuable portions of the house. The society also agrees to provide a share of the money or manpower to refurbish and repaint those portions. So the owner gets to live in a nice looking house, and property values increase if the whole neighborhood is doing this.
You make it sound like a simple win-win situation, which it is not. Suppose I own a property which a developer is willing to buy for a million dollars because he wants to build a high rise apartment or office building on the site. I want to sell, allow him to demolish the historical house, & retire to Arizona with the million. It seems right to me for historical interests to buy the property for what the developer is willing to pay without delaying the sale. I doubt that those wanting to preserve our heritage consider this as a first option if they are willing to ever consider it. Some years ago in my city a company owned a building with a valuable Tiffany Art Glass wall. A wealthy admirer of Tiffany art glass was willing to pay several million for the wall, which he wanted to install in his home. The company wanted to use the space for something related to their business & use the proceeds of the sale for investment in the company. Historical interests held up the sale for months (maybe years). My patience ran out before it was resolved, so I have no idea of the outcome. The above seems outrageous to me. Historical interests should be willing to pay the piper if they want to call the tune. Why should the wealthy man be denied the opportunity to buy the art glass? Hardly anyone in the city knew about the art glass wall until the company wanted to sell it & the historical people started interfering with the sale. While it was not the case, the company could have been in dire financial condition & in need of the proceeds of the sale. What a wonderful result if the company went out of business & a few hundred people lost their jobs.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. I was just describing how it works in some municipalities. In the USA preservationism is almost exclusively the province of charitable organizations. Most of their money comes from bequests and from the donations of limousine-liberals like Bill Gates, with the balance from the nickels and dimes the rest of us send them. They don't have the capital to purchase everything whose preservation would enrich the culture of our descendants. Look at the state of the environment. By now, most people in the developed countries recognize that pollution, urban sprawl, deforestation, overfishing, loss of biodiversity and several other trends create a legacy that their own descendants are going to inherit that will reduce the quality of their lives. Yet how many of them have the maturity and discipline to divert a meaningful portion of their wealth and/or effort to addressing these problems? This is what happens when you try to protect a building or other large, non-portable work of art. The selfish, callous short-term thinker who wants a larger shopping mall has more money to pursue his ignoble goal than the charity-dependent organizations who are thinking of the future. This is why governments step in and assume custodianship of the environment and (in some countries) historical treasures. You're a little out of touch with reality if you think the undercapitalized preservation societies can simply scan the news carefully and rush out to purchase every art object whose future is in jeopardy. The people who end up in charge of preservation societies are, understandably, left-liberals, because conservatives care more about profit than culture. They don't want such a treasure sequestered in the homes of the wealthy, where only the other wealthy people they invite to their cocktail parties will be able to see it. They want it on public view where (in their fantasies) people will line up with their children to admire it. There ya go. Nobody cares about this stuff today because they're too busy watching CSI and WWE. But each successive generation has more wealth, more leisure time, more education and more cultural and environmental awareness. So every generation suffers for the sins of its ancestors. Wouldn't we all like to draw and quarter the assholes who killed the last auk, the last thylacine, the last Carolina parakeet, the last dodo, the last moa? How about those assholes in Afghanistan who used artillery to destroy the ancient image of Buddha carved into a mountainside? The "historical people" you disparage are simply looking ahead and trying--in their own blundering way--to leave our descendants a better world than we, appararently, are willing to leave them.
The following is not quite my point of view. I actually appreciate their concern with preserving our heritage. It just seems to me that they totally ignore the interests of the owners of various bulildings & art works. An owner often needs the proceeds of a sale for some (at least to him) important purpose. BTW: Posts & attitudes on this issue also indicate that the wealthy are usually put down for enjoying their wealth. I am happy with reproductions of Maxfield Parrish art. He went to my Alma Mater & is special to me. I also have some reproductions of Escher works. His art intrigues me. I do not care that some wealthy people can afford to own the originals. I am not sure I would pay for the originals if I could afford to do so.
There are a number of ways that communities can be protected. Firstly, government should not allow house prices to spiral out of control which means that family members can live near each other. You can also allocate housing resources i.e council house to those who have family within that area.
Yes they do. It's socialism at work: people only have the right of ownership of the wealth they produce up to a certain modest maximum. Beyond that it belongs to "society," which in practice means bureaucrats are going to have control over it. (As opposed to communism, in which no one has the right of ownership of any of the wealth they produce.) Yes, so many people in the West love to do that. Until they see the economic statistics and discover that by world standards even America's "poor people" are outrageously wealthy, with their homes, cars, cellphones, computers and Big Macs. You seem to be a little vague in your understanding of how (and perhaps more importantly why) free markets work. Price controls create more inequities than they prevent. They also distort an economy, reducing the creation of wealth or even destroying existing wealth. Remember: "You can never do just one thing." Look at what rent control has done to Manhattan and Santa Monica.
So if some cockneys wanted to move to Brighton, you'd say Not so fast. And if the community is multicultural and it slowly stops being that way, would you stop that too?
Doreen I not saying anything other than community is more important than buildings. Yet, the least important has protection while the more important doesn't. Its just an observation.
Santa Monica, once a showpiece of L.A.'s beachfront, is turning into a slum. Landlords can't increase their rents to keep up with inflation, so they can't afford to keep the houses well maintained. As in many urban areas in the USA, renters far outnumber homeowners. So they always vote for renter-friendly, landlord-hostile civic leaders. Of course none of these people understand the principles of economics so they're always wondering why their paint is peeling and their plumbing doesn't work. We moved out of L.A. several years ago so my information could be out of date.
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