The hammer that mutilates the face of the country must be stopped. One law would suffice. Let it be made. Whatever the property rights may be, the destruction of a historic and monumental building should not be permitted to these ignoble speculators whose interest blinds their honor; wretched men, and such imbeciles that they don’t even understand that they’re barbarians! There are two things in a building: its use and its beauty. Its use belongs to the owner, its beauty to the whole world, to you, to me, to us all. Thus, destroying it is exceeding one’s rights.
Victor Hugo, “War on the Demolishers” (1832)
Currently, the well-thinking middle class in Buenos Aires has a new obsession: preserving old buildings. The city’s historical heritage, they say, is under threat from the government - it is allowing beautiful old buildings to be torn down and replaced with “luxury apartments”. Under, basically, the same logic as Victor Hugo above, they oppose new housing, infrastructure, and even cutting down trees. Their hatred of “the hammer that is mutilating the country” extends as far as (sigh) historic Ermenegildo Zegna stores in the most expensive parts of town.
Let us dispense with the notion that there is any actual validity to these concerns. Old big trees are not landmarks, or heritage. Old houses from the 1960s, built out of lead and asbestos, are not necessarily landmarks or heritage. Random old stores are neither. The concerns for demolishing luxury designer stores are extremely revealing: there is no real issue at play here, simply an aversion to things changing. Buenos Aires NIMBYs think that their right to beauty far exceeds everyone else’s rights to being able to live in the same city as them. The reason European cities preserve old buildings isn’t that they’re old, but that they have value - and most of the beautiful buildings that they want to preserve were, in turn, built on top of even older buildings themselves.
For a crowd that endlessly whines about the privatization of public spaces, underinvestment in transit infrastructure, or unaffordable housing, they sure do give cover to random busybodies suing the government to stop the construction of subway stations (and then being sued back), or to (once again) block luxury housing developments being built on top of even more luxurious stores, simply because the mediocre building which houses them is “pretty”. In fact, the H subway line (the last one built) took 63 years to complete, and the D line was supposed to have one additional station - Manuela Pedraza, which was built and then blocked by a judge because neighbors complained about the future noise.
So we know that there’s barely any benefits to this sort of move - occasionally, actual historic landmarks that would have been lost otherwise are preserved. But usually, it’s random well-off meddlers with too much time and too many opinions preventing improvements to the city other people also live in simply because they don’t like that an old, ugly house nobody can afford is being turned into more homes that at least some can afford, or that an old tree has to be uprooted to make way for transit infrastructure.
The reason housing is expensive in most big cities is that a lot of people want to live in them, and that there are too few homes for them. The notions that there’s empty houses lying vacant, or evil foreigners scooping up all the apartments, are simply misguided myths. The benefits to this sort of move are diffuse, but the costs are real: not enough housing that is too expensive. Going to far in the direction of historical preservation can end up in preserving laundromats or parking garages. The tree preservation people opposed turning a third of Buenos Aires’s widest avenue, the 9 de julio, into a bus lane - which one do you think has had a bigger environmental impact?
The truth is that living somewhere (and usually, not even that) does not give one special rights. The only “wretched imbeciles” in this discussion are the people who think that their right to enjoy the beauty of a handful of 1960s asbestos-and-lead monstrosities trumps everyone else’s rights to be able to afford living in the city.