What an Old Bus Terminal Can Teach Us About Building a Strong Town
Everyone has a different entry point on their Strong Towns journey. For many members and readers, it’s the urgent need to help make their streets safer. Others are committed to sound fiscal management and alarmed at seeing their cities on the road to perdition.
My entry point was historic preservation, or more specifically, discovering a better way to frame the case for it. Opponents of preservation projects often posit that the case for restoring old buildings is sentimental or aesthetic. Strong Towns taught me that many of these structures are a product of the traditional development pattern and that some of the best arguments for saving them are economic.
The preservation community's emphasis on adaptive reuse reflects that. The first wave of preservationists in America focused on historic sites and properties significant in the country’s early history. They were successful at saving treasured places such as Mount Vernon and Valley Forge, and they helped spawn federal historic preservation legislation and a grant program.
At street level, however, the calculus can be more challenging. The costs of restoring an old building often exceed those of demolishing and rebuilding it, and some structures have hit the end of their natural life cycle. Such churn can be healthy for a city, but many places in North America show signs of short-sighted decision-making (by property owners and elected officials alike) that marred the natural advantages cities enjoy. One obvious example is the staggering amount of surface parking that sits unproductively where buildings and sometimes whole neighborhoods once stood.
An article in Preservation Magazine (summer 2024), spotlights five former Greyhound Bus stations that have been restored for a variety of uses. A Tennessee developer converted a vacant local landmark into a popular diner. A station in a Texas town has become a new and much-needed downtown hotel. And in Baltimore, a local nonprofit is converting a sleek 1940s model into a headquarters and sports facility. Each of these projects was unique and required creative funding solutions, and each resulted in the productive use of an existing building.
For housing, the economic case for preservation can be even stronger. Studies have shown that real estate values are higher in registered historic districts, and even adjacent neighborhoods see a boost. That’s not strictly a calculation that older equals better — it’s more an endorsement of a sense of place that was much more likely to develop from a previous era of North American city building. (It’s also why I seek out neighborhoods from the 1920s when I travel).
While on my local historic preservation board, I participated in a webinar in which a former director of historic resources for Massachusetts gave a succinct summary of how not to do preservation: 1) Acquire a historic property; 2) Fundraise extensively to stabilize and renovate it; 3) Open a museum.
He wasn’t trying to discourage all the motivated advocates who were trying to save buildings in their community. He was saying that for preservation to succeed — and to recapitulate — it has to be part of a sound economic plan.
As many Strong Towns supporters (and incremental developers, in particular) know, this battle is often fought one building at a time. But if a structure as purpose-built as a 20th-century bus station can keep contributing to a place economically and aesthetically, there are probably a few properties in your town that can, too.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.