The Racial Politics of Historic Preservation in in Los Angeles: A Conversation with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Hao Ding

At first glance, historic preservation seems to be a key part of good urban planning.  But whom does historic preservation actually serve? In this week’s episode, our guests discuss their recent LCHP report that analyzes the power dynamics behind historic preservation.  They look at the way in which historic preservation norms have been applied as an instrument of cultural control in three Southern California communities with large Asian-American populations. At the end of the day, they pose the question of whether historic preservation should be seen as an instrument of good planning or a form of cultural imperialism?

Read their full report here: "The Politics of Power: The Historical Evolution of Architecture and Cultural Identity in Minority Communities"

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is the Interim Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and a core faculty member of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. Anastasia seeks to integrate social and physical issues in urban planning and architecture. Her research looks at the public environment of the city, its aesthetics, representation, social meaning, and impact on the urban resident. Her research emphasizes its “user focus,” understanding the built environment from the perspective of those who live and work there. Anastasia is the author of numerous articles and the co-author of the books Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (University of California Press, 1998), Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (MIT Press, 2009), Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Divided? (MIT Press, 2019), and Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City (MIT Press 2020).

Hao Ding is a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He earned his PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA in 2024. His dissertation “Planning for Accessibility: Implications for Regional and Local Planning and Beyond,” analyzed how people’s access to jobs and other opportunities would be improved by embedding accessibility metrics into local and regional planning processes. He has co-authored more than 25 research publications, including articles for the Journal of Transport and Land Use, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and the Journal of the Transportation Research Board. 

Transcript

Narrator 0:08

Welcome to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, building knowledge of the past through the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

David Myers 0:33

Hello, this is David Myers, host of Then and Now from the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. I'm pleased to welcome to today's episode Hao Ding, a doctoral student in urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Anastasia Lukaitou Sideris, who is Associate Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, distinguished professor of urban planning, and a core faculty member of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. And Hao and Anastasia are the authors of a very interesting recent report titled The Politics of Power, Architecture, Cultural Identity and Race. It explores the way in which historic preservation and other restrictions on building are practiced in three Los Angeles County cities, in which we see a clash of cultural norms between veteran residents and newer immigrant arrivals, particularly Asians. Howe and Anastasia see historic preservation as a bastion of conservationist and conservative cultural values that seek to rebuff architectural and design innovation brought on by new arrivals. To understand where this impulse came from and how we might think of or modify it in the future, we're delighted to have Hao and Anastasia with us. Welcome to Then and Now.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 1:56

Thank you for having us.

David Myers 1:58

So let's begin with a little bit of history, Anastasia. Can you tell us a bit about the history of historic preservation, the practice itself? When did historic preservation become a thing in this country?

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 2:11

Yes, it actually has a date. October 15, 1966, when the National Historic Preservation Act was signed. Before that, there was no policy, no requirement, no mandate to preserve uh buildings. And then post-World War II happens in the 1950s and 60s, and they bring a number of things. They bring the building of freeways, which decimated a lot of historic neighborhoods. They bring urban renewal. And then we have people like uh Jane Jacobs in 1961 publishing the death and life of great American cities. And so the public starts becoming much more concerned about the cities that disappear and the buildings and uh, you know, the community landmarks, etc. So we have the National Historic Preservation Act. It establishes the National Register of Historic Places. It also very importantly establishes a state historic preservation office in each state.

David Myers 3:15

And would you say that that practice that began in 1966 is continuous with the impulse to preserve and safeguard antiquities and relics? And I hear I'm thinking back to another culture which you know well, Greece. Um the the the impulse to preserve monuments, relics, antiquities. Is this the same impulse updated to take account of modern architecture or something different?

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 3:42

I would say that the root of both impulses are the same, the need to preserve the past, to preserve the history of communities, to preserve places that that are important. A big question, as we will see in historic preservation, is whose places are commemorated, whose places are preserved, and how are we inclusive in these places?

David Myers 4:04

Okay, well, let's jump right into that um without further delay, because one of the associations that one derives in your report at times is between historic preservation and NIMBYism. So you begin your report by arguing that historic preservation is, quote, often described by the values, preferences, and histories of dominant groups, unquote. In a sense, it's a kind of product of cultural imperialism. So I wonder if you see it in this way, and if so, why?

Hao Ding 4:36

So when we uh wrote about uh this point about cultural imperialism in at the beginning of the report, we're very much talking about the power dynamics between different groups, the cities of Arcadia, St. Gabriel, and Althambra in uh the St. Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles. They are multi-racial and multi-ethnic. What we see is the conflicts because of the arrival of new immigrants are shaping public discourse about place identities in these cities, in these communities. And during the shaping of public discourse or during the debates, a coalition between white residents and the Hispanic residents come together to construct this identity of a Spanish fantasy or Spanish ideal of their neighborhood as a counterforce to the increasing influence of the incoming Asian residents. And through that public discourse, they have managed to preserve a lot of the Spanish colonial or Spanish mission style architecture and also make that style sometimes required, but often encouraged style throughout the city.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 6:04

And I would add, if I may, that yes, cultural imperialism is at the heart of the historic preservation project. If you think about even from 1966 onward, it is really the history of the more dominant white groups that are being preserved. And I would say we encountered what Howe was saying, similarly, in these three cities that we looked at. In San Gabriel, we talked to uh some of the officials there, and one of them said San Gabriel from its beginning was quite there were Asians that came to build the railways, there were Native Americans, but their history is kind of forgotten, and yet you see this reconstruction of this Spanish past, which to a great extent is real, but it is also imagined. It becomes a very romantic idea of Spanish heritage of the city at the exclusion of other ideas. So we're not critical necessarily that this is commemorated, the Spanish past. What we are trying to say is that there are other communities, especially in diverse cities, that often do not see their landscapes celebrated.

David Myers 7:20

There is at some level an irony in the fact that the dominant white group clings to the Spanish style, though I suppose perhaps not, because it's in some sense doubly imperialist. There is there is a certain irony built in there.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 7:36

Yes. And if you look into the laws of the Indies, for example, the first planning legislation that set up the American city, it goes back to the European cities with it with their plazas and how they were designed, and it gets inspiration. And so the Spaniards were the white colonists, and that's where the Spanish past gets reinvented.

David Myers 8:08

And then the cultural and aesthetic norms of new arrivals, current day uh populations. And I'm just wondering how you, as students of architecture and design and historic preservation, understand architecture in general.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 8:28

I think the role of architecture should be to serve the needs of the people that use it. That becomes more difficult in a very diverse city. Uh, but but that's the challenge, I guess, that planners and urban designers and city officials have. Architecture is not a monolithic thing, but it does need to represent the values of the people who live in the cities. And we found a gap in these cities that we looked at in terms of what the official rules and regulations and planning codes were projecting and requiring, and some of the values of the incoming communities. Now, this is not as simple a story. There are more nuances. There is the nuance of the existing community that feels threatened by the newcoming populations and feel that they're losing their community, right? There is the story of the perception of an incoming community as monolithic, while oftentimes it's not. There are different values even within the Asian community. So, you know, there are we tried to the extent possible to explain some of these parallel stories that happened in these three suburban areas that focus around the built environment and architecture and tastes, but they have their roots in human nature, in sometimes xenophobia, sometimes racist feelings, sometimes feelings of fear that you're losing your own space and all that.

David Myers 10:11

And I assume it's complex too, because I'm assuming you would not say that all forms of historic preservation are mere instances of cultural imperialism. Presumably, there are instances in which you would agree this is a building that should be preserved.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 10:27

Absolutely. Not only, I would say not only building, it could be a whole neighborhood, but this was not always what we were finding. We were finding um neighborhoods sometimes that were had very, very different styles. They did not have any coherent architectural style, and yet the city would move very quickly to re-establish design guidelines that only favored the particular styles at the expense of others. But on the other hand, I think both Howe and I very much agree that there are certain buildings, certain districts, certain neighborhoods that have important meaning for certain communities that need to be preserved. I mean, we're not anti-preservation, we're anti-exclusionary preservation.

Hao Ding 11:12

Yeah, uh I just wanted to add that not only are some of these neighborhoods architecturally diverse, sometimes the neighborhoods don't really have that much level of architectural um sophistication to justify for preservation.

David Myers 11:34

Okay, well let's uh take a look at the cities you placed at the center of your study. Three cities, Arcadia, San Gabriel, and Alhambra, all of which have a majority Asian population, uh Arcadia and San Gabriel 61%, Alhambra 51%. And you study each of these three communities carefully with a particular focus on architectural building and design norms, and you are particularly interested in four um features or I suppose research questions uh that guide your study. Uh the phenomenon of mansionization, um general architectural styles and designs, historic preservation, and ethnic business, especially um in the cities you look at the prevalence of massage parlors. And what you're trying to gauge is the ebb and flow of power relations between veteran residents and city officials and new arrivals. And so can you briefly tell us what you found?

Hao Ding 12:35

The first major conflict that we found in those cities are around machinization. And this often happens at a very rapid pace, which is why it's causing a lot of resistance from existing residents. What we found in those cities is that new buildings or new uh building applications were rejected because they were argued that they're they don't fit into the existing uh architectural style or architectural coherence of the neighborhood.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 13:12

And the rejections often were not because the planning law was violated, it was the applicant may have followed the rules in terms of how much square footage he or she could build. It was more violated in what we kept hearing um mass style compatibility, which is a if you think about it, it's a bit more subjective idea because it is not prescribed. So they could build it by law, but then the design review would come and say, Yeah, we know you can build it by law. But you really, it's not fit the rest of the neighborhood well. So why don't you go back and redesign it?

David Myers 13:54

Yeah, but I must say that was a curious feature of your description. That this kind of advisory function that had almost a coercive quality to it. It wasn't precisely the absolute demand of the Planning or Design Commission, but it was this process of consultation that sort of advised those planning to build, well, this is not really compatible with the complexion of the neighborhood. So I wonder if you could just tell us what's the process actually like? Um what what is what steps are involved in the process, and where does it become formal coercion and where does it have this more amorphous advisory quality to it?

Hao Ding 14:35

When there's an application to build a new home, that applicant, either a developer or you know, just a homeowner, the application needs to go through several development review processes. One of them is design review. And uh in all three cities that we studied, there are design review boards. They have the discretionary power to reject uh uh an application. Um of course their their justification was based on the design of the building, and a lot of times the terms we just mentioned, mass scale compatibility, are used in this discretionary process uh to to basically design a project or just just ask the applicant to redesign, um even if they uh follow all the planning codes. Because if the application doesn't uh comply with the planning code or building codes, they will be rejected by the by the municipal planner first before it reaches the later stages.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 15:47

And and what we we found interesting is that these were most of the fights were around this issue. We were expecting initially that there would be a resistance in terms of the styles that are um very prominent, the Mediterranean style, the Spanish style. And we did not see that much of a hassle with this and that much of a conflict. Actually, sometimes the Asian communities like to use these styles for two different reasons. One is that they feel that they're going to pass rightly so, review much faster if they follow uh the accepted styles. Excuse me, but number two, uh, sometimes, and there has been an article even before ours that talks about that they like some of these more um different styles, they have been used even in East Asia because they convey some level of prestige, uh, etc. So we did not find that much conflict around architectural styles as we were expecting, and a lot of these houses actually are built by developers, some of them Asian developers that are being built to cater to the Asian community, and they are built according to the Mediterranean style. But there was much more conflict in terms of the size of the house. Uh, because as Hao was saying, you know, we are talking about larger Asian families, some of them that have been in these communities for 20 years, and they need to have the grandmother and the grandfather and they want to expand. Where we found some fights in terms of design elements were what we mentioned the large um entrance doors, the circular driveways, which again, if you think about it, if that's what a resident needs, why is that something that others should object? But but there are there are fights, uh, there were fights about about that.

David Myers 18:00

Yeah, you know, I'm curious about what you said about architectural styles um in light of the framing of cultural imperialism, because one might assume that new immigrants to the United States would be interested in um not just preserving what they uh knew from home, but also accommodating, acculturating to new architectural styles uh of their adopted country. And I assume that that's a regular process. And it sounds like um in terms of architectural styles, this is occurring. So I suppose this brings us back to the question of cultural imperialism. How prevalent is it in light of the fact that many new arrivals are more than happy to adopt, or at least willing to adopt, uh the architectural styles of Southern California in the 21st century?

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 18:56

Yeah, but but David, uh style is definitely one issue, but it's not the only issue. Uh the landscaping, feng shui principles, the type of doors and windows, orientation, there are other parts of the urban form that may be different, even though, as we mentioned, we didn't see big uh fight against the style and the size of the buildings.

Hao Ding 19:21

I think to that point we did find a certain level of uh contestation around styles, and most of them are around the this issue of architectural coherence within a building. And that that goes back to the issue uh as Anastasia just talked about, the big entry doors, uh regular uh circular driveways, or even trees. If those certain uh preferences of you know a certain building elements doesn't fit into the so-called um standard style of a building, and then that's going to be an issue in design reviews.

David Myers 20:04

Okay, could you say a word about the ethnic businesses uh that um you looked into and that issue?

Hao Ding 20:11

Yeah, so uh by ethnic businesses were mostly looking at massage colours, and um what we found out was that there were a lot of uh stereotypes associated with massage parlors, which led to the ordinance in the city of St. Gabriel to basically limit the total number of massage parlors uh within the city limit, and also a distance between the massage parlors themselves and also between one parlor to uh residences and also schools. The key issue we found was that those stereotypes may not have been justified by actual uh evidence because uh one of our interviewees raised the point that they didn't receive any police reports about the massage parlors, but it's the stereotypes that they are, they might be associated with crimes or other behaviors that led to this organization.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 21:13

It is a very ethnic specific activity. I mean, there are massage parlors in uh East Asia, they have nothing to do with prostitution at all, and uh yet the massage parlors in these communities were seen a lot by the non-Asian population as fostering prostitution with no real evidence. Uh, and so there were comments that we were getting like, well, these are not family businesses, it's obscure, we don't know what's going on. And to the extent that an ordinance was created in San Gabriel that very much limits the number, they have to be so many meters away from residences or away from one another. And kind of treating them as you know very problematic.

Hao Ding 22:04

Yeah, treating them more like nuisance. And a key problem here is the lack of understanding between the two groups and a lack of willingness to understand uh the opposing uh group. Because many of the commissioners don't want to take the time to to actually understand what's going on in these massage parlors, they just make the decision based on the stereotypes. And this this was an uh Asian um Asian American commissioner in one of the cities.

David Myers 22:37

Yeah, well, this relates to a question: who are the gatekeepers? Who are the guardians of the old here?

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 22:43

Yeah. We have started seeing the Asian community making some strides. And we did talk uh to both Asian and non-Asian, we made a point to talk to both Asian and non-Asian commissioners and design review board members. And still um the majority are non-Asian, but we have seen, we have seen certainly uh differences and a number of, and we did find um differences in the perception of these issues, the urban form issues between Asian and non-Asian commissioners.

David Myers 23:18

I'm just curious as we move towards the conclusion, what does a more enlightened form of historic preservation actually look like? Is it a form of historic preservation that is provides much more latitude to individual builders and prospective homeowners to have a door the size that they want? Um is it um greater openness to a larger number of particular forms of ethnic businesses like massage parlors? What what what actually would a better kind of historic preservation look like?

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 23:52

Well, I would say that first of all, one needs to identify what is worthy preserving and what not, because not everything needs to be preserved, right? And it can be adaptively reused, it can change, etc. Number two, it it would uh it should reflect uh uh uh the values and the needs of both existing populations, newcoming populations. I mean, uh everyone wants their past to be commemorated and have a say in what we choose to commemorate, and so I think a bit of a more inclusive uh process, uh much more communicative process. I mean, we were taken a little bit aback about some planners who said, well, we really need to educate uh the Asian community about the value of uh these existing uh buildings, and we agree with that, but there needs to be it's a two-way process. There needs to be also an education of the longtime residents of uh maybe the values of the Asian community. So it's not a one-way street, it should be a two-way street, it should be much more participatory processes and collaboration and including some different voices in what gets developed, what gets preserved. And we hope that as you know the councils become more diverse and the planning commissions, this is going to happen, but it is a good lesson for planners. And actually, we finished a report and the article that came out from this about pretty much what is more of an enlightened approach to development and preservation.

Hao Ding 25:29

Yeah, I think throughout our report, we were not only talking about historic preservation, we're talking more broadly about regulations of the built environment, the architectural uh controls that the cities can impose. And when you have regulations of architectural styles or the appearance of buildings, it's going to be problematic because styles and appearance of a building or the beauty of an architecture is subjective based on people's different tastes and preferences. And during the process of making those uh regulations, if the tastes and preferences of a certain group becomes the dominant force in shaping the regulations, then that's going to be exclusive, and that's not taking into account the voices or the tastes and preferences or the values or even the needs, real needs, material needs of, in this case, the incoming uh residents of the CEOs.

David Myers 26:33

We've been talking about the politics of power, architecture, cultural identity, and race, a report by Howe Ding, a doctoral student in urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Anastasia Lucaitu Sideras, distinguished professor of urban planning at the Luskin School. Howe and Anastasia, thank you so much, both for your work on this very interesting report and for this most stimulating conversation.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris 26:58

Thank you very much.

Hao Ding 26:59

Thank you for having us here.

Narrator 27:03

Thank you for listening to Then and Now, a podcast by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, LutskinCenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Maia Ferdman, with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support. And thanks to you.