#165 1955 · Historic Savannah Foundation · Historic preservation
Savannah saved condemned buildings not with a landmark law but by buying, restricting, and reselling them forever
the problem
Historic buildings kept getting demolished, and the city had no landmark law and no fund to stop it
background
In 1955, demolition of Savannah's 1870 City Market and the threatened demolition of the 1820 Davenport House for a parking lot galvanized seven women to found the Historic Savannah Foundation — at a time the city had no zoning protection for historic buildings and no public money earmarked to buy and hold them. The obvious paths were both dead ends: lobbying for a landmark ordinance would take years city officials showed no appetite for, and buying buildings outright to preserve them forever would exhaust any donor base within a handful of purchases.
The foundation instead treated ownership as a temporary tool rather than an end state: buy an endangered building, attach a permanent preservation covenant to the deed, then resell it to a vetted buyer committed to restoring it — and put the sale proceeds straight back into buying the next endangered building. Sources don't pin the exact year this specific revolving-fund structure was formalized versus the foundation's 1955 founding; it developed over the years immediately after.
what everyone would do
The two available paths were lobbying for a landmark preservation ordinance, which the city showed no appetite for and which could take years even under the best circumstances, or raising donations to buy endangered buildings outright and hold them permanently — a model that would exhaust any donor base after a handful of purchases, since money spent on permanent ownership never comes back to fund the next rescue.
what they saw
The foundation saw it didn't need to own a building forever to protect it forever — the covenant attached to the deed was what actually did the protecting, not who held the title. Once a permanent preservation restriction was recorded against the property, the foundation could sell the building to a private owner and recover its capital, because the protection traveled with the deed regardless of who owned it next.
the move
The mechanism let the same pool of money save one building after another indefinitely instead of being spent once: acquisition, stabilization, a vetted resale to a preservation-minded buyer bound by a perpetual covenant, then reinvestment of the proceeds in the next property — a structure that became known nationally as a preservation 'revolving fund.'
why it works
Buying an endangered building, attaching a permanent covenant, and reselling to a vetted buyer committed to restoring it lets the foundation recover most or all of its capital while the protection stays in force indefinitely — the covenant, not the ownership, carries the permanence. Because proceeds from each sale go straight into acquiring the next endangered building, the same limited pool of money saves one building after another instead of being spent once on a single permanent holding, and because private buyers restore and maintain the properties with their own money out of genuine ownership motivation, the foundation's capital accomplishes more per dollar than it would if the foundation had to fund restoration and upkeep itself on every building it held.
the payoff
By the mid-1960s the foundation had turned $38,000 in option purchases into $1 million of reinvestment in a single thirteen-acre district (Pulaski Square–West Jones Street), and over its first fifty years the foundation is credited with directly saving more than 350 Savannah buildings.
where it breaks
The mechanism requires a functioning market of private buyers willing to purchase covenant-restricted property — without demand for a building bound by a permanent restriction on what an owner can do with it, the resale step fails and the fund can't recycle. It also depends on the covenant being genuinely enforceable in perpetuity, which requires a legal framework that upholds running restrictions against future owners who never directly agreed to the original terms; a jurisdiction without strong legal support for that would see the protection erode over time. And it depends on being able to resell buildings for close to what was spent acquiring and stabilizing them — if a distressed property's covenant-restricted resale value falls well short of that cost, the fund shrinks with every cycle instead of sustaining itself, and the entire advantage of a self-perpetuating pool of capital collapses.
what came after
The revolving-fund model was adopted by preservation groups across the US and is now standard practice taught throughout the preservation field — Historic Savannah Foundation's early version is generally credited as one of the first in the country, the origin of a technique rather than a copy of one.
references
- [1]Historic Savannah Foundation — Revolving FundHistoric Savannah Foundation, 2024myhsf.org
- [2]New Georgia Encyclopedia — Historic Savannah FoundationNew Georgia Encyclopedia, 2023georgiaencyclopedia.org