The More Things Stay The Same, The More They Change

Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con on living in old neighborhoods:

... you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another.

It's a long an interesting post about the different kinds of attitudes you find among old-neighborhood residents, but I was struck by the paradox that historic district regulations are an instrument of change in neighborhoods like his and mine.

I wonder if that's an idea that lots of people don't get.

I know that I'm attracted to such places because of the opportunities they present for making things happen -- changing the ugly to beautiful, the inhospitable to livable.