The ongoing controversy over an apartment complex proposed for the edge of historic Spanish Town is significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s the first challenge the embattled neighborhood has faced since gaining status last year as a local historic district. Until recently, the city’s oldest area had no legal recourse against developers wanting to raze aged structures in the name of progress. Now it does, at least on paper. So how this fight plays out in real life will set a precedent for future battles.
But the controversy is also important because it’s something of a gut-check moment for a beloved, Bohemian neighborhood that is its own worst enemy in one important respect: The attributes that have made Spanish Town the eclectic enclave for which it is revered are the same ones that have kept it from really cleaning up its act. It’s a historic area that has attempted beautification but resisted gentrification, which is often the key to bringing old neighborhoods back from the brink.
It’s not fair, though, to entirely blame Spanish Town’s fiercely libertarian streak for the fact that it has yet to get its collective act together. From the mid-years of the 20th century until recently, the neighborhood was largely occupied by renters—a motley crew of artsy types who benefited from the dirt-cheap rents set by absentee landlords, who had no incentive to fix up the investment properties they had inherited. Neither tenants nor landlords had any reason to back preservation efforts, and, in fact, had plenty of reasons to fight them.
That dynamic has shifted, however. New data shows that nearly 60% of homes in the 15-block area are owner-occupied, compared to just 10% in 1980. Perhaps more important, neighborhood residents own another 14% of the rental structures. In other words, almost three-fourths of Spanish Town is now resident-owned, and these people have a vested interest in preserving and restoring an area that is still at least as shabby as it is chic.
So at a time when Spanish Town property owners are consumed with fighting a big development planned for their backyard, they are also grappling with how best to clean up that figurative yard, which is liberally sprinkled with cracked sidewalks, errant garbage cans and a row of rent houses recently derided by esteemed urban planner Andres Duany as “mud huts.” Addressing those problems while still maintaining the character of the neighborhood is a balancing act that will require every bit of cohesiveness this diverse community can muster.
Its own drum
From its earliest days, Spanish Town has danced to the beat of its own drum. As the neighborhood’s name suggests, it was an area inhabited by Spaniards from the Canary Islands who’d originally settled in Ascension Parish and didn’t like the prospect of becoming American once Louisiana was purchased by the U.S. So they petitioned the governor of Baton Rouge, which was still under Spanish dominion, and received permission to resettle here. An area was carved out for them that in 1805 officially became known as Spanish Town.
In 1810, the area came under American rule, but the name stuck. Regrettably, most of the antebellum structures did not. All but a handful were burned by Union troops during the Civil War. After the war, however, the area experienced a rebirth by another renegade group of sorts—the free people of color. They settled in Spanish Town, and a few of their humble, Creole cottages still dot the narrow streets today.
In the early years of the 20th century, Spanish Town attracted a new and vibrant group of residents who were affiliated with the growing LSU, then located at the nearby U.S. garrison grounds. In fact, Spanish Town became something of a college town, populated by professors and even some students, who lived in the many craftsmen-style bungalows that are the most prevalent of the historic structures in the neighborhood. Even the university’s first fraternity houses were built in Spanish Town and still stand.
When LSU moved to its present location in the early 1930s, the new State Capitol building and the workers it brought to the area kept the neighborhood alive. But in the middle years of the 20th century, Spanish Town’s fortunes took a turn for the worst. The interstate cut through the neighborhood in 1957, sealing the fate of the one-third of the structures that were on the east side of the highway. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood fell into a slow decline. Many old homes were torn down to make way for multi-family structures of various sizes, shapes and god-awful designs. Rental properties fell to disrepair.
About this same time, however, historic preservation started catching on around the country. And, as surprising as it may seem in a city that has little appreciation for anything old, the Planning Commission was actually ahead of the curve. In early 1973, it came out with a plan suggesting that Spanish Town become a protected historic district, much as the New Orleans French Quarter had become in the 1930s.
The plan would have gone a long way toward preserving the neighborhood before some of its most egregious eyesores were built. It called for creating a special commission to regulate not only land use, parking, and the mass and scale of buildings, but really specific details like exterior design, color schemes and building materials.
Experts will tell you that kind of specific legislation is what it takes to successfully create a historic district. The Vieux Carre Commission has that kind of power over the French Quarter, as does the Historic Charleston Foundation in Charleston, S.C. But those who were involved in the effort in Baton Rouge more than 35 years ago say there was never much interest from neighborhood residents or the larger community to enact such restrictive legislation for Spanish Town.
“There was just not a lot of support for it,” recalls Bill Brockway, a retired architect and former LSU architecture professor. “There was just no appreciation for old things or for any sort of long-range planning.”
The early pioneers of preservation in Spanish Town didn’t give up. In 1978, they managed to get Spanish Town onto the National Register of Historic Districts, a largely honorary distinction that makes it easier to get historic tax credits for restoration. But even that seemingly positive development didn’t go over particularly well in a neighborhood that bristled at the notion of government intrusion on their property rights or way of life.
The reaction was much the same a few years later when, in the mid-1980s, the neighborhood petitioned to join the Downtown Development District. Realtor Darryl Gissel, who moved to Spanish Town in 1981 and owns several pieces of property there, recalls the battle that ensued over what in retrospect seems like such a no-brainer.
“It was a huge fight,” he says. “We had neighbors who wouldn’t speak to one another over the DDD. But without the DDD we wouldn’t have any clout.”
To understand the reasons for the resistance, you have to understand the character of the neighborhood, which residents like to describe as Bohemian. They flaunt their tolerance for all types of diversity as proudly as they plant pink flamingos on their lawns. Spanish Town is more like New Orleans than it is the rest of Baton Rouge, which helps, perhaps, explain why much of Baton Rouge doesn’t really care for it and why those who live there have been loathe to tell their neighbors how to live much less what to do with their property.
But another reason for the pattern of resistance has to do with the fact that over the years a handful of wealthy families came to own a lot of the rental property in the area, property they assumed the state would come calling for when it needed another office building or two. For years, they sat on these humble structures and let them deteriorate into veritable shanties, naturally opposing any efforts to protect the status of the area.
“I remember after one of these fights in the 1980s,” Gissel says. “This old lady came up to me and shook her cane in my face and accused me of trying to steal her children’s inheritance. That was the mentality. They thought the state was going to give them $1 million for their houses and that’s why they were just sitting on them.”
A turning tide
But over the years, as much as Spanish Town has resisted gentrification, its preservation efforts have slowly paid off, and today, advocates of the neighborhood feel confident that the tide has turned. Gissel recently surveyed all the structures in the neighborhood and crunched the numbers. The results surprised even him. Of the 207 structures in the neighborhood—not counting office buildings and multi-family complexes larger than six units—120, or 58%, are owner-occupied. Even more significant, 30 of the rental units, or 14.4%, are owned by people who live in the neighborhood.
What this shifting dynamic has done is allow Spanish Town to finally get united behind neighborhood preservation, and more specifically, behind the idea of the area as a historic district. That was most dramatically reflected in March 2008, when nearly 40 years after the Planning Commission first floated the idea, the Metro Council passed a local historic district ordinance for Spanish Town.
Unlike the plan suggested in 1973, however, the 2008 ordinance doesn’t have sharp teeth. In fact, it hardly has teeth at all. Essentially, it gives the say-so over development in Spanish Town to the Historic Preservation Commission, an obscure, 4-year-old entity that can be overruled by the Metro Council and has been tinkered with by the Planning Commission staff that is supposed to advise it.
According to the law, the HPC is the agency that determines whether structures of 50 years old or more can be demolished. It is also supposed to regulate what new structures can look like. But the language in the ordinance is vague, only requiring that new structures be an appropriate scale and style for the neighborhood. That leaves open a lot of room for interpretation, especially in a condensed neighborhood that is ringed by high-rise state office buildings and a couple of large apartment complexes.
Richard Preis returns
That’s where the controversy over the Capitol Lofts apartment complex begins. Earlier this year, developer David Slaughter proposed building a 124-unit, six-story apartment complex on 1.7 acres on the northeast edge of the neighborhood owned by his partner in the project, Richard Preis. Part of the property consists of a lot that became vacant in the mid-1990s after Preis tore down several homes there he had inherited. The rest of the parcel comprises seven renter-occupied houses that would have to be razed to make way for the apartment complex.
After neighborhood residents mounted an aggressive opposition campaign, Slaughter and Preis cut the size of their project down to 67 units. They also modified the design—actually, they’ve modified it several times—and even suggested they might be willing to save two of the seven houses and relocate them. But Spanish Town hasn’t bought it.
Admittedly, the neighborhood’s preservationist crowd has a long-standing bias against Preis. They’re still smarting over the houses he tore down in the mid-1990s and the fact that the resulting vacant lot has been used, at times, as a parking lot during the legislative session. The rest of the properties he owns, which he has acquired over the past couple of years, are among the most run-down rental units in all of Spanish Town. And to top it all, he tore down the abandoned but historic Ice House building early one Sunday morning several years ago to make way for River Place, a high-rise condo project that has yet to materialize.
“That engendered a lot of hostility among the neighborhood,” explains John Sykes, a long-time homeowner in the neighborhood.
But to Sykes and others the real problem is not that Preis and Slaughter want to build new residential in Spanish Town. In fact, they claim they would welcome single-family homes or duplexes. It’s the size and scale of the proposed project they’re worried about, especially in an old neighborhood that already has an inadequate infrastructure and narrow streets.
“They keep showing us revised drawings with a different façade,” Sykes says. “But it isn’t so much the façade we’re worried about. It’s the mass and density of the building.”
For his part, Preis maintains the value of his property doesn’t justify building anything less than a 67-unit complex, and even that’s a stretch. He bases that calculation on an appraisal he had done after acquiring the various houses. It valued the property at about $55 per square foot.
Some have disputed the appraisal, namely because it was based on comps from the commercial heart of downtown and includes, among others, the old Baton Rouge Bank building and a parking lot on Third Street that is among the most valuable commercial property in the city. What’s more, when Preis bought the 10 lots in Spanish Town—which are a combined 44,460 square feet—he paid slightly more than $771,000 for them, according to public records. That averages to just $17.34 per square foot.
Still, he maintains his property is worth the $55 per square foot noted in the appraisal because of its prime location in downtown and proximity to the State Capitol. For now, it really doesn’t matter anyway because he’s sitting on the land and he’s not giving it up for any less than that. Which is why the Spanish Town preservationists and homeowners are biting their nails, waiting to see whether their newly acquired status as a historic district amounts to more than a quaint-sounding distinction.
No one knows how it will play out, but the preservationist crowd has reason to be nervous. When Preis initially submitted his request to demolish his homes to the HPC, the Planning Commission staff, which is supposed to advise the agency, came back and recommended that he be allowed to tear them down. Citing reasons that Preis himself had supplied to the Commission—peeling paint, wood deterioration and windows painted shut, to name a few—the staff went so far as to classify the buildings as a threat to public health.
That troubled the opponents in Spanish Town, who point out that most old houses have peeling paint and windows painted shut. But what really riled them was the fact that Slaughter and Preis had a copy of the report before members of the HPC did. Moreover, there was never any public discussion on the issue. It appeared, at least on the surface, that the fix was in.
So the neighborhood went public with its complaints, holding a news conference, which drew some attention to the matter. In the meantime, the developers withdrew their request to demolish the seven houses. In an ironic twist, the HPC voted to slap Preis with the city’s relatively new “demolition by neglect” ordinance for the condition of his houses. That could end up costing him in fines for every day that he doesn’t fix up the houses he wants to bulldoze.
Here’s the thing, though: Under the law, Preis and Slaughter can take their issue directly to the Metro Council, where they stand a better chance of getting the green light. The Metro Council seldom refuses to acquiesce to the wishes of developers. Yet, if that happens in this instance, then the HPC has no clout and being a historic district means nothing.
“If Preis and Slaughter are allowed to do it, how do we stop everyone from doing it?” Gissel says. “After all the weird stuff we’ve been through in this neighborhood, we thought we had finally gained a little respect.”
What’s the fuss?
But there are detractors of Spanish Town who have said, in the heat of this controversy, that the neighborhood hasn’t earned the respect it thinks it deserves. They walk the cracked sidewalks and see weeds, dilapidated rental units and garbage cans that spend days at a time on the curb, and question why residents who are so worked up about a 67-unit apartment complex don’t seem bothered by their own blight.
On the surface, that sounds like a valid criticism. But it ignores the bigger issue about whether being a historic district actually means anything in Baton Rouge. It also overlooks the very real difficulties that have existed in cleaning up the neighborhood.
One of the biggest problems, of course, has been absentee landlords. Despite the gradual progress that has been made in recent years, nearly 40 rental structures are still owned by absentee landlords, and many of their homes are in pitiful states of decay. Preis is among the worst offenders, and is the first to admit he hasn’t bothered fixing up properties he acquired in an already-dilapidated condition because they’re not worth it.
“The amount of money that is required to fix up those houses makes no economic sense,” he says. “The economics have to drive it and the economics don’t drive putting $200,000 in each of those houses.”
Preis isn’t alone. The Brousseau family owns several rentals along Costello Lane, which could double for a shanty-town movie set circa 1945. They did not return calls for comment. But neighborhood activists say they have reached out to such property owners and are actively working with them on ways to clean up the houses. They’re walking a fine line, however, trying to do so without pricing the neighborhood’s lower-income residents out of the market.
“We’re trying to work with the landlords and say, ‘Here’s what we expect. You have to keep your properties habitable and safe,’” says David Brown, president of the neighborhood civic association. “But we don’t want to ask them to invest so much in their houses that they have to recoup that with higher rents.”
The neighborhood is also trying to educate renters who may want to become owners and other potential buyers about the advantages of historic tax credits that are available at both the state and local level. They can be quite generous, currently totaling up to a maximum of 51% when combined.
Part of the job of the HPC is to engage in education outreach, and HPC members say that’s something they are planning to do more of in the future. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana is also taking up the cause of Spanish Town and has added the neighborhood to its Treasures in Trouble list.
“This is such an important neighborhood for our community,” says Carolyn Bennett, who is director of the FHL and also a board member of the HPC. “We’re trying to do more to educate the community about what’s at stake.”
But even as it makes progress, Spanish Town is still hamstrung by two obstacles. One is the lack of stronger legislation that really protects the district and spells out in plain terms what can and cannot be done there. The other is a collective mentality that has historically made passage of such an ordinance all but impossible and still, to a degree, resists the gentrification that would really transform Spanish Town into a Savannah or Charleston.
“While we’re tinkering with beautification and improvements in the neighborhood, we want to be careful not to fall into that pattern of just getting our buildings more and more expensive so that it prices too many people out of the neighborhood,” Brown says. “We’re so much the opposite of a gated community and that’s a big part of the appeal.”
