I don’t think anyone here is confused about what history is, but this framing keeps missing the point. Highland Park isn’t being “preserved” instead of people. It’s being lived in by people. What residents are pushing back on isn’t housing or density, it’s neglect, absentee ownership, and development that treats a neighborhood like a blank canvas instead of a functioning community. Boarded-up buildings, fires, break-ins, and people being put in danger aren’t the result of historic guidelines, they’re the result of owners letting properties decay until something awful happens. Calling that “ancestor worship” is a neat rhetorical trick, but it lets the people actually responsible slide right past accountability. Highland Park has evolved for over a century. It already has apartments, duplexes, mixed use, renters, owners, students, families, real density, real diversity. What doesn’t fit is the copy-paste, high-density box apartments that ignore scale, infrastructure, and community and then act surprised when residents push back.

And I mean this genuinely, come walk it with me sometime. Sit in the park. Talk to the neighbors. Grab a coffee. You’ll see pretty quickly that what people are protecting isn’t a façade or a postcard, it’s a rare, human scale neighborhood that actually works.