Biden Aims to Speed Up Historic Preservation Reviews in Projects
(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden’s administration is taking steps to accelerate project permits and reviews involving historic buildings, part of an effort to build out infrastructure and climate resiliency in American communities.
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The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency, on Thursday proposed a draft program comment on Accessible, Climate-Resilient, Connected Communities aimed at accelerating timelines for historic preservation reviews, a change impacting investments worth billions of dollars.
Specifically, the changes — if approved — would help provide an alternate way for federal agencies to comply with provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act, according to the statement, across three sectors, housing, climate-smart buildings, and climate-friendly transportation.
If adopted it would promote the “renovation and reuse of America’s historic buildings for housing that is affordable, accessible, energy-efficient, climate resilient, and hazard-free,” exempting most interior renovation projects from the review process and allowing site work and facade projects with limited or no reviews.
The changes would benefit more than one million households living in 190,000 public housing buildings in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s portfolio, millions of units backed by the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture and thousands of other projects funded by the federal government.
The proposal also aims to accelerate emissions reductions and energy savings in buildings by allowing the installation of solar panels on historic buildings involved in federal projects without further historic preservation review, facilitating the electrification of historic buildings and by broadening the scope of building energy efficiency improvements. And it seeks to promote pedestrian, bicycle and public transit projects.
“What we’re trying to do is to get these projects completed more efficiently and still keeping historic preservation in mind, but really focusing reviews and agency investments in those projects,” ACHP Chair Sara Bronin said.
The White House has sought to walk a fine line by encouraging developers to increase the pace at which they build clean energy projects and other types of infrastructure, while at the same time working to safeguard long-standing environmental protections.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian pointed to a “massive infusion of investment.”
“We are building a lot more, with a lot more capital than we’ve had on the government side, ever. And so we need to do that and abide by our environmental protection,” Quillian said.
Earlier this year, the administration finalized its second set of changes to the nation’s environmental permitting rules in a bid to speed up the building of renewable energy infrastructure.
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