[MassHistPres] Sales/new owners in LHDs

[Jeremy Ebersole]

While not MA, in my previous life in Milwaukee, WI, the staff at the City's
historic preservation office did monitor for home sales in historic
districts and sent them the attached very useful brochure regarding the
requirements of living in a local district. It and other materials they
provided are available on their website at
https://city.milwaukee.gov/cityclerk/hpc/Publications. This would need to
be adapted to the MA context but may nonetheless prove useful. They
regularly still had to field Certificate of Appropriateness requests from
homeowners who had adapted their  homes claiming they did not know about
the requirements, so this provided a way for them to be more confident new
homeowners did indeed know.

Jeremy Ebersole
Greenfield Historic Commission
former ED, Milwaukee Preservation Alliance

On Tue, Oct 7, 2025 at 8:06 AM Johnstone, Michelle via MassHistPres <
masshistpres at cs.umb.edu> wrote:

> Good afternoon, everyone –
>
>
>
> Happy Monday! Reaching out to the greater group to ask: what you all do in
> your community when a property is sold in a local historic district? Do you
> monitor for sales and send a welcome letter? If so, do you find that this
> is helpful? Here in Worcester, we don’t do anything, and sometimes new
> homeowners find out that they are in a local historic district the first
> time they pull a permit on the property. Of course, sometimes no permit is
> pulled (and sometimes isn’t even required), which causes issues when people
> claim they simply didn’t know/were never told their property is in a local
> historic district.
>
>
>
> If anyone has a great example of a letter that you send to new historic
> property owners, please feel free to share!
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> *Michelle H. Johnstone *
>
> Senior Preservation Planner
>
> Executive Office of Economic Development | Planning & Regulatory Services
> Division
>
> City of Worcester | 455 Main Street, Rm 404, Worcester, MA 01608
>
> P: 508-799-1400 x31410
>
> C: 774-622-0695
>
> E: johnstonem at worcesterma.gov
>
> www.worcesterma.gov
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> MassHistPres mailing list
> MassHistPres at cs.umb.edu
> https://mailman.cs.umb.edu/listinfo/masshistpres
>
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