Heritage buildings help make New Zealand’s cities and towns beautiful. While foreign visitors might snicker that an eighty-year-old building has heritage value, the art deco styles in our small towns are jewels. And so too are the facades along many of our city streets.

But there are trade-offs. Preserving historical authenticity during mandatory earthquake strengthening is not cheap. And when the building’s cash-flow cannot cover those costs, owners can be left in a difficult position.

Many owners of heritage buildings bought them because they treasure them, and want to preserve their value. But when it is the broader public that benefits from preserving heritage buildings, should the costs fall solely on those owners?

Wellington has the country’s worst urban earthquake risk and Wellington Council started thinking about building strengthening well before others. It is ahead of the game.

But there is much yet to do.

This week, The Initiative and our member Deloitte jointly released a short research note on the state of heritage preservation in Wellington. Over a hundred and thirty Wellington buildings are both heritage listed and earthquake-prone. Figuring out which kinds of repairs are allowed for heritage buildings can be tough. And Council has no system tracking which kinds of quake-prone, heritage-listed buildings are able to navigate through the hurdles, and which are falling behind. In short, too little is spread too thinly across too many listed buildings.

We recommend that councils reduce the number of buildings listed in district plans, potentially with central government caps on the proportion of a city’s stock of buildings that could be listed. Any heritage building found to be earthquake-prone should automatically have its listing re-evaluated. Doing so would allow councils to focus scarce funding on those buildings of greatest historical value. A council-employed engineer helping building owners get started and navigate through the strengthening process could go a long way.

Consenting for strengthening of heritage earthquake-prone buildings should allow more sensible balancing of cost considerations against heritage value. In Christchurch, strengthening of the Trinity Congressional Church was blocked because it would have damaged some wooden shutters; for want of that strengthening, the tower came down in the earthquakes.