If you’re reading this, you probably know the power of preservation. But say this word outside of our community, and people might only hear “don’t touch” or “stop.” Help us to correct this mistaken impression. Preservation creates housing. It fosters economic opportunity, energizes neighborhoods, strengthens climate resiliency, and rebuilds our connections to our histories and to each other. Preservation helps accomplish what this country needs now.

Evidence of preservation’s energizing power exists all around us. Preservation efforts transformed the former Angier Avenue Baptist Church and underutilized adjacent buildings in Durham (NC) into a business and children’s center for the surrounding community. In Charleston, the long underutilized, iconic Cigar Factory, constructed in 1881 as a cotton manufacturing plant, now houses small businesses, restaurants, offices and an event space. The once abandoned Arcade building in St. Louis now provides 282 rental apartments, 202 of which are for households who earn significantly less than the median income.

Preservation projects have ripple effects, especially in smaller commercial districts like the one where Maine Grains is located. Seeking to revive a regional grain-growing economy, the founders of Maine Grains transformed a nineteenth century jail in Skowhegan, Maine, into a grist mill. The mill manufactures locally grown, stone-milled grains in a zero-waste facility. Their business has inspired other entrepreneurs. The jailhouse site now houses a community radio station, a creamery, a yarn shop and a café. Repurposing one vacant building, in this case a jail, helped revitalize Skowhegan’s downtown, invigorate a regional economy, create jobs, and foster a shared sense of belonging and pride.

Across the country, projects like these are enabled by the tools of preservation, including the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Historic Preservation Fund, federal and state historic tax credits, incentives for public/private partnerships, state agencies, historic designations, the National Park Service, and people in every state and Washington, DC who put these tools in the service of our communities.

The Historic Tax Credit (HTC) is a particularly powerful tool. Since its inception, the HTC has leveraged over $235 billion in private investment, rehabilitated 49,000 historic buildings and 670,000 housing units, at least 200,000 of which are designated as low to moderate income, and created over 3 million jobs.

This infrastructure, its people, procedures and tools, serves the public. It creates housing and jobs. It attracts capital to underinvested neighborhoods. It sparks community and civic connection. And, because the most efficient building is one that’s already built and retrofitted, it limits waste.

Crucially, preservation infrastructure protects sites where our history happened and brings alive stories honoring the lives and achievements of all Americans. These places help us to reconnect with our highest ideals and learn from those in the past who fought for freedom and unalienable rights.

At Stonewall Inn, we can remember the day that galvanized the LGBTQ+ movement. We can walk the battlefield at Gettysburg where Lincoln’s words calling for “a new birth of freedom” still echo. We can tour Cedar Hill, the home in Anacostia where Frederick Douglass lived and remember his scathing indictment of slavery in “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”. We can sit in Wesleyan Chapel, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton opened the first Women’s Rights Convention. And we can enter the Manzanar “War Relocation Center,” where over 11,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated without cause, to learn from their resilience and to ensure that this never happens again.

These sites and others like them map out a shared commemorative landscape that reflects our nation’s boundless hopes and global roots. By inspiring, challenging and sometimes horrifying us, the unvarnished stories these sites tell unify us as a courageous, free people eager to learn, even when it’s hard, because we strive to honor those in the past who fought to realize our nation’s founding promise.

Preservation creates all of this. The federal and state infrastructure that supports it must do justice to preservation’s potential and broad applicability. By strengthening this infrastructure to align with both what preservation can do and our abiding values and aspirations, we can maximize preservation’s creative power to serve the public now as together we build a humane, prosperous and shared future.