Sustainable Preservation: Creating Entrepreneurs, Opportunities, and Measurable Results

In recent years terms such as 'community', 'local', 'economic development', and 'sustainability' have featured prominently in the discourse of preservation. Yet we have seen little evidence of the successful application of these concepts as most organizations have published broad, vague missives about economic potential and community benefit rather than providing meaningful measures of their results and avoiding discussion of their failures. What are the measures of successful preservation and economic development, and what are the 'returns' both tangible and intangible, of these types of projects? In this paper, I discuss the nature of the prevailing discourse and some potential metrics for measuring success, and then apply these metrics to projects of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative.