All fall down All fall down (February 09, 2005)

Demolition by neglect: By allowing a historic building to fall apart, can property owners flout preservation rules?

By Andrea Gemmet

Almanac Staff Writer

The aging process is rough on any house. Roofs get leaky and foundations get cracked, wood gets warped and termites get hungry.

While most homeowners wage an ongoing battle against the depredations of time and the elements, there are exceptions. If you're saddled with a historic house you don't want, and are in no particular hurry, why not give Mother Nature and Father Time a helping hand and let them knock down the house for you?

It's not a new phenomenon, but it's one that continues to frustrate historic preservationists. They have an expression for it -- demolition by neglect -- and that's what Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs has been accused of doing to the 1926 Jackling estate in Woodside.

Mr. Jobs, a Palo Alto resident who has owned the Jackling house since 1984, last year won permission from Woodside officials to demolish the once-opulent mansion if he couldn't find someone to remove it from his property and restore it elsewhere. That permission, though, is on hold pending a lawsuit filed in January by a group of preservationists.

Mr. Jobs was unavailable for comment before the Almanac went to press, a spokesman said.

Designed by architect George Washington Smith to resemble a medieval Spanish village, the mansion was custom-built for Daniel C. Jackling, a self-made millionaire who revolutionized the copper mining industry around the turn of the century.

The 17,250-square-foot house has interior and exterior stucco walls built 14 inches apart to give the appearance of thick adobe. It has 14 bedrooms, 13-1/2 bathrooms and a custom Aeolian pipe organ. Decorative touches include imported, hand-painted tile and numerous copper accents.

Although the house was occupied as recently as 1998, in recent years its condition has rapidly deteriorated, the result of a leaking roof, missing doors and windows and other factors stemming from neglect, according to an architectural historian's report and Woodside History Committee members' observations. Gaping holes have been poked into the double walls, noted Woodside Councilman Dave Tanner.

"Beyond some relatively minor deferred maintenance, the present condition of the house is a result of willful neglect. The intentional removal of doors and windows has exposed the interior of the house to the elements, thereby causing further damage," the History Committee reported to the Planning Commission in February 2004.

Mr. Jobs all but confessed to the practice during an exchange with Councilwoman Carroll Ann Hodges at the December 12 Woodside Town Council meeting, when council members were weighing an appeal asking them to overturn the Planning Commission's earlier approval of a demolition permit.

Mr. Jobs said at the meeting that if he didn't get the demolition permit now, he would keep just trying over the years until he got one.

"Are you trying to wear us down?" asked Ms. Hodges.

"I think the elements will wear the house down," Mr. Jobs replied.

The council also asked Mr. Jobs about the poor condition of the house. The Jackling house's doors and windows were removed to prevent vandals from breaking or stealing them, Mr. Jobs said.

"Usually you put plywood over them. Why was that not done?" asked Councilman Pete Sinclair.

Mr. Jobs said he didn't know.

When asked to respond to the allegations of willful neglect, Howard Ellman, the attorney representing Mr. Jobs, said, "It would not be appropriate for me to comment on any of this at this time."
A widespread problem

Demolition by neglect is a widespread problem, and has long been a concern in historic preservation circles, says Michael Buhler, a regional attorney with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Western office in San Francisco.

"It's a difficult issue because it's so incremental and takes place over a long period of time," Mr. Buhler says. "There's no specific act that you are trying to prevent, just general neglect."

A national survey of historic preservation commissions conducted in 1994 by the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions reported that demolition by neglect was cited as the most difficult situation to deal with. Of the nearly 800 commissions included in the survey, only 25 percent said they had any authority over incidences of demolition by neglect.

Nevertheless, there are examples of cities across the country that have adopted ordinances that address demolition by neglect, Mr. Buhler says. In Tacoma, Washington, the state court of appeals last year upheld the city's decision to use eminent domain proceedings to take over the dilapidated 1915 Elks building in the downtown historic district. The court's decision found that "a landowner who allows his property to fall into disrepair endangering the community thus transfers decision-making authority over the property to the elected representatives of that community."

Mr. Buhler says the National Trust is often contacted by cities enacting historic preservation ordinances for model legislation that addresses demolition by neglect.

San Francisco lists a set of very specific, visible conditions that indicate a building is being neglected and requires owners to repair the damage or face penalties, he says. Typically, these types of ordinances are found in big cities, not small communities like Woodside, he adds.

"And it doesn't necessarily mean that if an owner wishes to legally obtain a demolition permit that (he) can't," Mr. Buhler says.

With its pricey real estate and large lots, Woodside doesn't often encounter problems with run-down properties.

"Woodside doesn't have a handful of rules to address unkempt properties, because it doesn't really have any," says Planning Director Hope Sullivan. "Even if a place is run down, if it's a big enough property and there's a fence around it, it's not really causing a problem. If you see a rundown property in a city, what do they do? They put a fence around it.

"If you look at the Jackling house, it was secure, so was it a threat (to public safety)?" she says. "You could argue that it's not fit for occupation, but it wasn't being occupied."
No rules

Woodside has no rules on the books regarding historic buildings, and is in the very preliminary stages of crafting a historic element for the town's general plan that will guide future planning decisions. Simply agreeing that the town needs to add a historic element to its general plan in some form was the subject of great debate and numerous delays.

Proponents of historic preservation have said that historic buildings that evoke the town's rural past -- from a rough-and-tumble logging town to a community of great estates owned by wealthy San Franciscans seeking an escape from the summer fog -- are part of what makes Woodside such a desirable, expensive place to live. Clear guidelines will take the confusion out of the process and let the owners of historic properties know exactly where they stand when they want to add on to, tear down or renovate their buildings.

It's clear from previous public meetings on the topic, however, that a vocal contingent of Woodside residents doesn't like the idea of restrictions being imposed on historic properties and questions the right of anyone to determine whether something is historically valuable. Public meetings over historic preservation guidelines are sure to continue the thorny debate over the impact on private property owners' rights and how to balance the needs of the greater community.

In nearby Palo Alto, a city ordinance making it almost impossible to legally tear down the approximately 700 houses the city deemed historic was overturned by voters in 2000, capping an acrimonious four-year battle over property rights and historic preservation.
What's of historic value?

Certainly, determining a structure's historic value is more complicated than calculating its economic worth. Mr. Jobs has been very vocal about his opinions on the Jackling house's architectural merit ("an abomination," he said), the importance of its architect (he'd never heard of George Washington Smith, he said) and the historic significance of Mr. Jackling.

Since Woodside has no regulations of its own, the determination of what has historic merit falls to other agencies or state rules -- in the case of the Jackling house, the state's Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.

Independent experts hired by Woodside to conduct a CEQA-mandated study of the Jackling house's cultural significance found it was eligible for the California Register of Historic Places for two reasons -- as an important example of Spanish colonial revival architecture and for its association with Mr. Jackling, who was a wealthy and influential man during the first half of the 20th century. A 1931 addition to the Jackling house diluted its ties to Mr. Smith, its architect, according to the study.

"George Washington Smith is certainly a very important architect. He had a national reputation even though almost all of his commissions were in California. Historically, he's one of the most significant architects of the period of revival in the 1920s," says Pamela Post, an architectural historian based in Santa Barbara.

The city and county of Santa Barbara is home to a number of Smith-designed buildings, which are highly prized, she says. Demolition by neglect is a problem she hasn't seen with Smith houses. Neglect problems are usually the result of owners claiming financial difficulties in making repairs, she says.

Only properties with official landmark status are governed by a requirement that owners maintain them, but since the owners are almost always the ones who sought out the landmark designation, it's unlikely that they would willfully neglect them, says Ms. Post.

"Normally that's not an issue because the property is so valuable," she says.

As for the argument that a property is too far gone to save, she says that with enough money, "you can renovate and restore almost anything."

"But what do you do when it becomes too (financially) onerous? Although, in the case of Mr. Jobs, I don't know how onerous it would be," Ms. Post says.
State law

The provisions of CEQA made it harder for Woodside to grant Mr. Jobs a demolition permit for the Jackling house. Town officials are legally bound to show that, if the demolition of the Jackling house causes an irreparable loss to the community's cultural resources, the project must provide some sort of overriding public benefit.

The lawsuit, filed January 14 by Uphold Our Heritage and led by the daughter of a former owner, contends that the Town Council failed to show such a public benefit and thus acted illegally.

However, while CEQA might make it harder to get permission to demolish a historic building, it doesn't address the issue of demolition by neglect, says Mr. Buhler. The poor condition of the Jackling house was used by some Woodside Town Council members to justify its demolition, "but I don't think that's a legitimate argument," he says.

"It really rewards owners for neglecting their properties," Mr. Buhler says.

Howard Ellman, a San Francisco-based attorney representing Mr. Jobs, has pointed out that, while the town can refuse a demolition permit, it can't require Mr. Jobs to spend millions of dollars restoring and maintaining the Jackling house. According to estimates in the CEQA study of the house, rehabilitating the Jackling house would cost nearly $5 million and renovating and adding on to it to make it more habitable for a modern family would raise the cost to $9 million.

Mr. Jobs has said he has no intention of selling the property, because he loves the land and wants to build a more modest, say 6,000-square-foot, house for his family on the site.

"I bought it to tear down the house," Mr. Jobs told the Town Council. "The problem is, I've been very busy the last 20 years -- I should have done this 20 years ago."

Thalia Lubin, a member of the Woodside History Committee, raised the idea to the Town Council of an owner's moral responsibility to keep up the property in absence of any legal imperatives, but the idea failed to gain traction among the majority of council members.

"If I purchase Thomas Jefferson's letters and I cut them up and use them for notepaper, I can. They're mine, there's no law against it. But it's still morally reprehensible," Ms. Lubin said.

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