Unless the town was recently founded, we expect there to a mixture of old and new buildings as a sign that the town is organically and incrementally growing. However, for there to be a new building, there most likely was an old building that it replaced.

I am sympathetic to those that try to preserve old buildings. We have buildings full of great architecture and great memories, and it is a shame for us to loose them. But realistically, we cannot preserve every building, because if every generation simply built then moved on, it would become obvious that many of our towns would quickly run out of space. Naturally, as our town grows and needs change, buildings need to be renovated and in many cases, replaced.

What is worth preserving?

There is no one answer to this, but the buildings most worth preserving are likely to be the buildings with the most value. A building of sentimental, architectural, or historical importance is likely to have value. From a free-market perspective without any distortions or regulations, the only time you would replace a building is to replace it with something better. As a business, it makes very little sense to replace an asset of high value with an asset of low value - as you would have made a loss in that transaction. In this case, the business would be better off selling the building rather than replacing it.

There are exceptional cases to this, such as when a stadium attempts to buy out all of the surrounding properties and turn them into parking. In these cases, perhaps labelling the property 'historical' could give it legal protection, but perhaps the argument should be on wasteful land use, not neccessarily perserving some random old buildings.

We know the free-market system works for the most part because our modern cities are full of well preserved historical and modern buildings. I am going to show some examples from Adelaide, Australia. I am using Adelaide because the city is my hometown - it was where I was born and raised - so I can think of several examples.

Adelaide Arcade is a beautiful shopping arcade from the 1890s;