If Your House Is in a District, Approval Comes First

Both, and in that order. New York's Historic Homeownership Rehabilitation Tax Credit is a state income tax credit worth 20 percent of qualified rehabilitation expenses, and the State Historic Preservation Office states that all projects must be approved before work begins. Repoint the front elevation in June, find out about the credit in September, and the credit on that work is gone with no way to recover it.

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What the credit is worth and who can claim it

New York's Historic Homeownership Rehabilitation Tax Credit is a state income tax credit equal to 20 percent of qualified rehabilitation expenses on repair, maintenance and upgrades to a historic home. Four things have to be true. You must own the home and live in it. The home must be listed in the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places, either individually or as a contributing building in a listed historic district. It must sit in a qualifying census tract. And total qualified expenses must be 5,000 dollars or more, with a minimum of 5 percent spent on exterior work. That last condition is the one masonry answers easily, because repointing, brick replacement and chimney work are all exterior work, so a masonry project clears the exterior minimum without anyone having to arrange the numbers. What the program will not do is reimburse work you have already had done, and that is the part which catches people out.

Approval comes before the work, and there is no way back

The State Historic Preservation Office states it in a single line: all projects must be approved before work begins. That is a sequence rather than a formality, and it is the most expensive thing on this page to get wrong. Repoint the front elevation in June, discover the credit in September, and the credit on that work is gone. Not delayed, not appealable, gone, because the office never had the opportunity to review what was proposed for a wall that no longer exists in the state it was in. This is unlike almost every other decision in a masonry job. A wrong mortar can be raked out and done again, expensively but genuinely. A missed approval cannot be re-run, because the thing it would have applied to has already been rebuilt. So if there is any chance your house is listed, the order is check first, apply second, sign a contract third.

The city has a separate approval, from a different board

Inside the City of Syracuse there is a second gate, and it is not the same office as the state one. The city operates a Syracuse Landmark Preservation Board, authorized by the city zoning ordinance, which administers a Certificate of Appropriateness process, and the city states that any exterior alterations to designated sites or to properties within preservation districts must be reviewed by the board through that process. The board's published pages name four local preservation districts: Berkeley Park, Sedgwick-Highland-James, Hanover Square and Columbus Circle. Notice what the trigger is. Not a change of appearance, not a renovation, but exterior alterations, which is precisely what repointing and brick replacement are. The state tax credit and the city certificate are two separate processes run by two separate offices, and being inside one does not put you inside the other. If your address is in the city and you are planning exterior masonry work, the board is a phone call worth making before the quotes arrive.

You may be a contributing building without knowing it

Most people living in a National Register district have never had a reason to find out. The National Park Service's geospatial records list nineteen districts inside the City of Syracuse, and the large ones are ordinary residential neighborhoods rather than downtown landmarks: Strathmore By the Park with 332 contributing buildings, Scottholm Tract with 266, Onondaga Highlands and Swaneola Heights with 260, and the Berkeley Park Subdivision with 126, along with North Salina Street at 85, Hawley-Green Street at 48, Armory Square at 46 and several more. That is well over a thousand houses whose owners mostly have no idea. Outside the city line the same records list the Skaneateles Historic District with 59 contributing buildings, the Manlius Village Historic District with 50, the Genesee Street Hill and Limestone Plaza Historic District in Fayetteville with 40 and the Oswego-Oneida Streets Historic District in Baldwinsville with 32, plus individual listings including the Lucius Gleason House in Liverpool, the Solvay Public Library and five listings at Camillus. Checking takes minutes, and it is the cheapest step in the entire sequence.

Five places in the county where there is nothing to check

None of this applies everywhere, and you should hear that before you spend an afternoon on it. Queried for Onondaga County, the National Park Service's National Register points and polygons return 166 records, and not one of them is located at Clay, East Syracuse, North Syracuse, DeWitt or Salina. Those five have no National Register listing of any kind in the federal geospatial records: no district, no individual building, no site and no structure. If your address is in one of them there is no district approval to wait for, no Certificate of Appropriateness to obtain, and no state credit to apply for by this route, and you can book masonry work on the ordinary timetable. The Jamesville hamlet inside DeWitt is a partial exception worth knowing about. Federal records place three individual listings there, the Dr. John Ives House, Saint Mark's Church and the Southwood Two-Teacher School, but no district covers it, so unless your house is one of those three the same conclusion holds.

What the preservation office will push back on

Approval is not a rubber stamp on whatever the cheapest bidder proposed, and the objections are usually about materials. The State Historic Preservation Office says exterior and interior work is eligible as long as it does not significantly change the house's overall historic appearance, and it warns that the use of modern materials over existing wood or masonry may lead to future moisture damage to the structure as well as diminishing the historic appearance of the building. In the same guidance it states that replacing repairable historic material is never recommended and that damaged historic material should be replaced in kind. Set that beside Preservation Brief 2, which requires repointing mortar to be more vapor permeable and softer in compressive strength than the masonry units around it, and the two are making one point from two directions. A proposal to coat, clad or render a deteriorating brick wall instead of repairing it is likely to fail on both counts, and a proposal to repoint that soft brick with a hard modern mix is the same failure in a less visible form.

What to do this week if you think you might be listed

Three steps, in order, and not one of them requires hiring anybody. First, find out whether the house is listed, individually or as a contributing building in a district, and whether it sits in a qualifying census tract, because that decides whether the 20 percent credit is available at all. This matters to a lot of addresses here: the City of Syracuse has 67,601 housing units at a median year of construction of 1948, with 43.1 percent built in 1939 or earlier. Second, if you are inside the city, ask the Landmark Preservation Board whether your work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness. Third, if the credit is in play, get the project approved by the State Historic Preservation Office before a contract is signed, keeping the 5,000 dollar minimum in qualified expenses and the 5 percent exterior minimum in view. Only then start collecting quotes, and make the specification part of what you compare rather than an afterthought, because the office cares what materials go back into the wall. When you reach that stage, send us the address and what you are planning, and we will connect you with licensed, insured contractors who will put the specification in writing.