In This Town, Renovating Instead of Tearing Down Puts Money Back in Your Pocket

For six years, a historic French Eclectic chateau in Hinsdale, Illinois, had sat on the market, and Mimi Collins was getting nervous. The local realtor had walked many clients through the Chicago-area residence, designed by architect Alfred Pashley in the 1920s for a daughter of George Healy, the official portrait painter of Abraham Lincoln. Their reactions were always the same, Collins says: "It’s great, but I don’t know how to modernize it, and it needs a lot of work."

Also troubling was the estate’s spacious half-acre lot in the affluent and popular Chicago suburb with soaring land values and little oversight on non-landmarked buildings. "I didn’t want to see the house knocked down," says Collins, who’d grown so attached to it that in November of 2021, she bought the property herself to restore it.

Since the 1990s, Hinsdale has lost about half of its original housing stock due to teardowns, estimates Jim Prisby, a member of the village’s historic preservation commission. He says the number often topped 100 a year, a sizable dent in the village’s approximately 5,500 single-family residences, which include historic Craftsman and Prairie homes, Queen Annes, and Cotswold-style cottages. In their place went oversized McMansions. The village tried limiting home sizes, but that backfired, Prisby says. Rather than scalpel in renovations to meet the zoning restrictions, homeowners would demolish the existing structures wholesale. A proposal to pause the issuance of teardown permits resulted in claims of overreach on property rights.

In September 2022, Hinsdale officials unveiled a new plan to curtail demolition. They established a historic overlay district that gives a series of incentives to homeowners who successfully apply—for free—for their house to be approved as a historically significant structure. The incentives include access to zoning regulations that are more lenient than those for new construction; an expedited permitting process; permit and application fee waivers; a partial rebate on property taxes for up to five years; and matching grant funds, up to $10,000, for historically appropriate exterior improvements.

"Rather than to continually focus on sticks and throw obstructions out there," says community development director and building commissioner Robb McGinnis, "we instead focused on carrots and incentivizing people to keep these houses." Community response to the new program, adds village planner Bethany Salmon, "has been more successful than we imagined." Sixteen months after its launch, 79 homes have been approved as historically significant.

In July 2023, Sarah and Chad Erwin became the first homeowners to receive approval for their 1883 gable home with Queen Anne details. A year earlier, they had been alerted by their contractor, Catie Knoebel, to hold off on their planned reconfiguration of an awkward and small side deck in anticipation of the imminent historic overlay district. Their patience paid off. The couple was able to build 18 inches beyond what their previous zoning allowed—a difference that allows furniture to fit on their reworked deck. "It became an area where we could entertain and not just be a landing space," Sarah says.

The couple have become advocates of the program, which also expedited their permitting process and waived their $4,500 permit fee. "I’m having more conversations with friends with older homes who are intrigued about the process or are feeling incentivized by what we did," says Sarah.

Two blocks away, Sarah Chase plans to update her 1875 gable ell residence with modern amenities, like a mudroom, and a reworked floor plan to address quirks, such as an open staircase connecting the family room to the basement. The home’s previous owners had fended off builders seeking a teardown opportunity for two years until Chase and her family purchased the property in 2017. "When we were looking for a house, it was important that we were doing our part to keep an older home alive here in town," Chase says. A Hinsdale native with fond memories of growing up in her parents’ creaky older home, she had watched her town’s historic residences razed over time with devastation.

Though she and her husband, David, had begun the design process two years ago, life kept them busy and they didn’t start looking for a builder until recently. "Once we saw the incentives, it was certainly motivation to see the project through," she says . They benefited from the expedited permitting process and waived permit fees; upon their project’s completion, they will also seek approval to receive the partial tax rebate, totaling $6,000 over five years, and a matching grant.

In 2023, Hinsdale issued only 26 permits for teardowns, though McGinnis says it’s too early to attribute the decrease to the program. Salmon does sense a cultural change in how older homes are perceived, with real estate listings marketing those approved for the historic overlay district as full of potential instead of as teardowns.

Collins, the realtor, helped with this shift in perspective. After purchasing the French-style chateau, she began an 18-month journey restoring and updating everything from the building structure to its HVAC system, exterior, and landscaping. (She knew the home was too big for her so has since listed it, and says she now plans on renovating a historic cottage.) Though her work predated the incentive program’s launch, Collins opened the house for public tours and events to demonstrate the potential of historic homes.

This year’s program budget of $50,000—which funds the grants and makes up for the lost tax revenue—is almost entirely spoken for, Salmon says. The village is also tracking the opportunity cost of the lost permit revenue.

One city that has taken note of Hinsdale’s success is Naperville, 12 miles to its west. Though its population and size are nearly 10 times that of Hinsdale, the former farm town similarly has a land and housing shortage following decades of rapid growth starting in the 1950s. And, likewise, many original homes—which, in Naperville, includes a high proportion of midcentury modern residences—have been torn down to make space for new and significantly larger structures for homeowners with the means to do so.

Naperville Preservation, a grassroots organization, recently commissioned Chicago-based Preservation Futures to survey the housing stock of two midcentury neighborhoods by developer Harold Moser, East Highlands and River Haven Estates. Their sizable lots and proximity to the city’s walkable downtown make them particularly attractive for buyers looking to build new and big homes, says the organization’s chief preservation officer, Tom Ryan.

The surveys both confirmed and assuaged their worries. In East Highlands, around half of the 453 midcentury homes—a mix of ranch-style and split-level residences—have been replaced with new structures that average 3,000 square feet larger. However, in River Haven, which contains many midcentury modern residences, 83 of the neighborhood’s 96 original houses remain.

About 100 people attended a September 2023 community presentation on the survey results, a turnout that thrilled Naperville Preservation. Ryan says that many audience members asked, "What do we do next? How do we preserve what we have?"

The organization’s secretary and founding member, Jane Burke, doesn’t believe the city is ready to move forward with a formal preservation ordinance—yet. "Naperville has to understand that it’s built out, so we’re trying to keep increasing awareness until we have enough traction to put incentives in place," she says. Meanwhile, the group has researched preservation incentives for homeowners offered by cities nationwide, from Aurora, directly west of Naperville, to Scottsdale, Arizona. Burke also applauds the recognition Hinsdale has received for its program. "It’s really terrific," she says. "We hope that it will help all of us."

Related Reading:

Why Do Homes by Modern Masters Keep Getting Torn Down?

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