“I applaud your greenness and your desire to save the planet,” said architect and preservation board member Chris Landis, “and I realize that we are in crisis politically as well as sustainably. But I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just — it upsets me.”

DC’s Historic Preservation Review Board wrestled Thursday with the question of how to balance a climate crisis and the possibility of millions or billions of humans dying versus the danger of a less even roof line in neighborhoods such as Takoma. The board and Historic Preservation Office held to their practice of not allowing solar panels on the fronts of sloped roofs.

Homeowner Steven Preister has lived in his home on 5th Street NW for 35 years, during which time he painstakingly restored a 108-year-old house in need of major repairs to fine condition. Preister testified that he had an independent appraiser look at the house who “said I had extended the life of the house for an additional 100 years.” He added, “My main concern right now is, if we do not change and loosen these standards, will the District be habitable in 100 years?”

The house already has solar panels on the rear of the house and the board approved some on the porch roof and front dormer, but didn’t allow them on the main front roof. Preister was back with a revised plan for panels closer to the roof, just 4 inches instead of 6 off the surface, and with a “skirt” to hide the undersides. All of the neighbors on his block support his proposal, he said, as did Advisory Neighborhood Commission 4B by a unanimous vote.

That wasn’t enough to sway the board, which voted to again deny Preister’s application.

Preister’s house on 5th St NW by DC Historic Preservation Office.

At the meeting, most of the members struggled with how to reconcile the climate crisis, which might make DC uninhabitable or destroy most of its historic buildings, with historic preservation’s day-to-day aversion to visible changes in buildings. The ANC resolution and Preister himself noted that DC’s new clean energy law requires the District to reach 100% renewable energy by 2032 including 10% from locally-generated solar power, and the ANC “calls on the Historic Preservation Office … to require consideration of urgent climate considerations … in any design principle relating to ‘achieving a reasonable balance’ with historic preservation.”

Member Gretchen Pfaehler asserted that “I am in favor of sustainability,” but “this detracts from the slope of the roof” in a way that was unacceptable to her. She did suggest she might be open to some other technology which blends in more with the roof. “I think there is a solution but this is not that solution,” she said.

Greta Thunberg told the World Economic Forum in Davos, “I want you to act as if our house is on fire.” The board’s sentiment, in effect, was akin to saying, “We should put out this fire, but maybe the fire department can go back and get a different color hose first.”

ANC commissioner Erin Palmer (whom GGWash endorsed) said in her HPRB testimony, “I’m not sure what we are preserving if we don’t take serious efforts to stem climate change, in part through a more sensible approach to solar panel installations in historic districts.”

The board voted 5-1 against Preister’s proposal with Andrew Aurbach, a historian member of the board, casting the lone vote in favor. Aurbach argued that the sustainability issues outweighed the potential obstrusiveness. He did tell Preister, however, that “there are solutions that might help” make the solar panels less visible.

Marnique Heath, the board’s chair, said, “I share your passion and I applaud you for all that you’re doing both to preserve this house but also to preserve our climate. I hope you will be able to find another solution that you’ll [bring] back to us, because people like you who are real champions for sustainability are going to hopefully help save the planet. We need to do all that we can personally in order to do that, particularly as our governments are not cooperating.”

Some didn’t act like there was a fire at all, like architect Outerbridge Horsey. He said, “Step back and forget about the energy impact, just think about the color and the texture. Would this board think about allowing a glass roof on a historic structure? That’s basically what we’re talking about if you remove the sustainability issues.” Some might say removing the sustainability issues thereby misses the entire point.

Horsey and other members spent some time debating whether this house is different from another nearby, on Dahlia Street NW, where the board in February allowed solar panels facing the street. Members of the board and staff argued that the house there was higher up on a hill and more obscured by trees, as well as that the panels were actually not on the house’s front but a side that, since it’s a corner, also faced the street.

The previously-approved Dahlia St NW solar panels. by DC Historic Preservation Office.

The board also discussed an argument in the 4B resolution that since solar panels are simply mounted on the roof and don’t last as long as the roof itself, they’re “reversible” and “temporary” and thus shouldn’t face the same level of scrutiny as other changes to a building. Aurbach concurred, but Horsey and others argued, essentially, that they weren’t all that temporary and that anything is, at some level or another, reversible.

Despite some hopes that February’s Dahlia Street case would be “precedent-setting,” Steve Callcott of the preservation office, a part of the Office of Planning, was uninterested in making changes to the policies unless the board asked him to. HPO has been issuing successive drafts of sustainability guidelines for historic properties, which have continued to say solar is acceptable on secondary roofs or side or rear elevations but not on fronts.

Callcott did note that they’ve come some way since guidelines said solar panels should never be visible at all from any street. He said that the Department of Energy and the Environment has been asking for them to allow solar panels more broadly, but that he was going to release a final version of the guidelines for public comment without changing their standard.

This might be interesting to John Falcicchio, the mayor’s chief of staff and interim deputy mayor overseeing OP, who said last month he would “ask [OP] to look into this more” after a Twitter thread with Vox’s Matt Yglesias. Yglesias wrote,

I would like to install solar panels on my roof, but first I need to go in person to a DC Historic Preservation Review Board meeting to beg for permission to do this and it seems like bullshit to me. This is ostensibly a progressive jurisdiction that ostensibly believes climate change is a big problem and ostensibly would like to promote clean energy … why throw roadblocks in the way of doing it? Apparently what we’re supposed to do as we beg and scrape at the meeting is promise that the panels won’t be visible from the street. But why is that the standard? The whole problem is that old energy technology is extremely harmful. So why should everything look old? Like obviously if we transitioned to being a country that derived its electricity from different sources, heated its houses in different ways, and powered its transportation differently then as a consequence some stuff would look different aesthetically … why is that bad? “Things shouldn’t change too much” is, obviously, a conservative doctrine and it’s insane that notionally progressive jurisdictions have decided to entrench it as a core legal principle in land use. Imagine if we just hadn’t done electricity in the first place because the wires are visible from the alleys. Personally, I think it would be *better* if the panels were prominently visible from the street as well as the adjacent alley because then more passersby would see them and think about going solar themselves. Change is viral and that’s good.

Falcicchio replied:

I’m going to ask @atrueblood & @OPinDC to look into this more. I believe they’ve been working with @DOEE_DC & @TommyWells to see if it takes legislation or not to address. More to come, and thanks for shining light on the issue. — John J. Falcicchio (@falcicchio) September 13, 2019

Historic Takoma co-founder Loretta Neumann and former ANC commissioner Sara Green testified against Preister’s panels at the HPRB meeting. Neuman said, “I don’t ask anyone else to do what I would do or not do. I would never put solar panels on the front of that house. If you approve this I’m extremely worried that not just in Takoma but around the city that these could go up everywhere.”

She continued, “We do have places outside of our historic district where the fronts do have solar panels, for example across the street from our Safeway there are 2 bungalows with shiny installations and it’s too bad because they could have put them on the other side because it’s a north south facing house.” (In fact, for a north-south facing house the choice of side matters a lot, since there’s much more sun on the south.)

Bungalows with solar panels on Van Buren St NW. by Google Maps.

Whether solar should be highly visible, as on these houses, to spread the word about solar as Yglesias suggests, or permitted but with obtrusiveness minimized, as 4B and preservationists like Aurbach advocate, allowing them is still a minority viewpoint in DC’s preservation system. Barring action from the DC Council or stronger intervention by the Bowser administration, residents may have to make their voices heard when the preservation offices releases new guidelines in the coming weeks. Calcott said they anticipate a hearing before HPRB in December.

“I just think that the world is in crisis and we don’t have a lot of time,” said Preister. “Do I want solar panels there forever? No, but if it can relieve carbon emissions I don’t see what choice we have.”