Crowd questions quest for historic district.

Byline: SUSAN PALMER The Register-Guard

A clearly divided South University Neighborhood grilled city and state officials Thursday night about the impact of a historic district listing with the National Register of Historic Places.

At a neighborhood meeting, Ken Guzowski, the city's historic preservation planner, and James Hamrick, deputy state historic preservation officer, explained the status of a neighborhood application, submitted last fall.

Although many neighbors support the application, others came to the meeting with reservations.

"I don't have a problem with historic homes," property owner Ed Claric said. "If somebody wants to list theirs, fine. There's some beautiful homes here. But they shouldn't force it on everybody."

The application would list all the homes in the area bordered by 19th and 23rd avenues, and Alder and Agate streets south of the University of Oregon campus as a historic district.

A group of neighbors objecting to the designation successfully derailed the application in February with hundreds of notarized letters from property owners to the National Register of Historic Places.

The 11th-hour rally prompted the federal office to send the application back to Oregon for a closer look.

State officials did take a closer look at the letters, tallying 314. Of those, 238 were verified as property owners in the district with 20 letters coming from property owners outside the district and another 56 of undetermined ownership.

The area has 584 property owners, so verified objections represented 41 percent, not the majority needed to stop the process.

But plenty of the more than 100 people in the standing room only crowd Thursday night at Edison Elementary School wanted the process stopped.

They feared that the listing would infringe on their property rights, adding a layer of unwanted planning regulations. Others worried that low-income homeowners would no longer be able to afford homes there.

Many proponents of the district were on hand as well, defending the protection the listing would bring.

Still others were confused about exactly how being part of a historic district would affect them.

Area resident Marian Goldman said she wanted to put in dormer windows in her 1938 house and maybe add a glass front porch. Would she be able to make those changes in a historic district, she asked.

"I haven't written a letter of objection," she said. "I haven't made up my mind."

The state and city officials had precious little in the way of substantive answers to specific questions.

Interspersed through the questions and concerns there was plenty of finger-pointing.

Many people were especially upset that the burden wasn't on the proponents to rally a clear neighborhood majority but on the opponents to stop the process with a time-intensive procedure that required them to get their letters officially notarized.

Perhaps the most helpful comments of the evening came from Carole Berger, who has restored several historic homes and who loves the flavor of the homes in the south university area.

"What concerns me is the lack of information," Berger said. Residents need to understand the guidelines and how they'll impact the neighborhood, they need case studies, so they can see how the listing has affected real people.

"These are intelligent people," she said looking around at her neighbors. "They need answers."

When the 2 1/2 -hour meeting ended, Hamrick said his office would send letters to objectors whose records weren't in order, giving them a second chance to have their votes counted. He said that barring a majority of objections, the only way to keep the state from resubmitting the application to the federal government was if the city or the South University Neighborhood Association, which are the official applicants, pull the application.