With eminent domain, your property is taken outright."Historic preservation" lets you keep it -- you just can't do anything with it. In a way, it's even more harmful to the concept of private property. People don't get outraged at "preserving history," and nobody, after all, is really "losing" anything:
Scott Greider, a New York architect who grew up in Fort Wayne, is coming home.
He's moving to downtown Fort Wayne, where he would like to save a historic but crumbling former retail strip along the 1000 block of Broadway.
But St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church, which shares the block, owns three of the five buildings in question between West Washington and West Jefferson boulevards. The church wants to expand and might raze the two-story structures to do so.
Enter the Fort Wayne Historic Preservation Commission, which is considering them for local historic status. That would prevent the church, or any future owners, from changing or demolishing the buildings without the board's blessing.
[. . .]
Greider realizes the church has expansion plans, and that his efforts to save the buildings could put them at odds.
“I want urban churches to grow and prosper,” Greider said. “That mission comes up against another equally
