PROPOSAL TYPE
Working Group
SEEKING
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Specific Expertise
- Seeking Additional Presenters
RELATED TOPICS
- Labor and Economy
- Museums/Exhibits
- Preservation
- Social Justice
ABSTRACT
Many public history institutions are sustained by an under-acknowledged source of revenue: renting and leasing residential property. For over a century, prominent museums and historic sites have leased attics, servants’ quarters, caretakers’ cottages, and other obscure corners of their facilities to tenants whose rents have provided a steady stream of income and, at times, interpretive and cultural labor. This working group seeks to understand the dimensions of public history organizations that operate as landlords. Participants will devise concrete strategies for these institutions to promote pathways to affordable housing and adopt interpretive practices that acknowledge the role of renting in their institutional growth and operation.
Description
This working group has two primary goals: the first is to develop a systematic survey of public history organizations that documents the extent of renting and leasing residential property among these institutions. Such a survey would register the amount of rental units, rents, tenant demographics, and their financial contribution to each organization’s overall operations. Since many of these organizations often exchange tenant labor for reduced or free rent, this survey seeks to explicitly capture the role of tenant labor in past and present interpretive and preservation agendas at these institutions. The second goal is to utilize this survey data to generate a report available through NCPH’s website (similar to existing resources available under the “Publications and Resources” page). A secondary aim of this report is to begin thinking through a set of interpretive and institutional “best practices” for public history organizations that rent and lease residential property. These best practices would develop strategies for museums and historic sites to acknowledge the role of renting in their institution’s history and ongoing operations. Additionally, these best practices would offer ways that, as landlords, institutional staff can align their organizations with efforts to increase access to affordable housing.
This proposal is seeking interested co-discussants and feedback to help refine a final proposal for the 2024 annual meeting. Museums who currently rent and lease property and activists or others affiliated with the provision of affordable housing are especially encouraged to reach out!
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Brian Whetstone, Princeton University, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
This working group could do a great surface by brining this issue to the surface!
Another dimension of this topic is the use of this housing as residences for museum/historic site workers. I have heard several stories of interns, seasonal workers, and others who enjoyed this type of housing. There are others who experienced harassment and feared for their safety (and not incidentally their housing and jobs) and they found that there was no one to whom they could report these incidents.
Best of luck!
Have you considered including the various NPS sites that have historic leasing programs? It’s likely changed somewhat since my childhood, but my family rented one of the NPS farmhouses on the Gettysburg battlefield for a few years after my dad took a job at Eisenhower and Gettysburg in 1981 – and Gettysburg has dozens of farmhouses that people lived in then. It’s my understanding that leasing has changed a bit in that people want their own houses now and don’t want to live in park housing (for good reasons), but seasonal employees or folks on less-than-permanent gigs may still be using them. Having structures occupied is better for structural preservation than is leaving them empty.
I think that this is an interesting topic. As we return to conversations about company towns, it would be interesting to see how this could be a different model (or identifying the ways that they are similar). I would love to hear about the National Park System model for housing, in addition to hearing from folks who have lived in this kind of housing and how it was successful or not.
like the others, I also think this is a compelling idea and plan for a working group. I can easily see how this connects to the conference call for proposals; just be sure to make that explicit in your final submission. I think that you’d get some good folks who could help with the aspects that other commenters have shared so far