“What we do is very labor intensive,” Stocklin says. “We typically administer a lot of smaller grants, and each small grant has the same amount of paperwork to review as one large one.” In deference to seniority rules, there has also been talk of replacing some of Stocklin’s remaining staff with planners from another department who have no preservation experience, as well as eliminating a separate office of historic preservation altogether.

Meanwhile, Republican state Senator Linda Gray has proposed repealing the property tax break for historic homes, which preservation advocates say has been essential to the revitalization of Downtown. Gray, who counts no historic districts among her constituency in northwest Phoenix, publicly maintains that the issue is about fairness and funding schools. “On face value, should someone who maintains the exterior of their historic home get a 50 percent break on their property tax forever? I mean, forever?” she asks. Yet, in an e-mail to an opponent of the bill, she takes a decidedly more personal tone, complaining that she had to spend more than $16,000 this year to fix the foundation of her 1970s tract home. “I’m not looking for a government handout, because it is my problem with an older house,” she wrote.

Gray’s bill died in committee, but opponents fear that she might still maneuver to resurrect it before the legislative session ends.

By implication, Senator Gray seems to suggest that the city’s historic districts don’t need government assistance anymore, which might arguably apply in some of the neighborhoods. It hardly seems as if Willo, for example, is in danger of seeing a meth lab spring up in its midst any time soon. And if property values have plummeted 40 percent or more there, well, they’ve fallen that far (and even further) pretty much everywhere else in the Valley, too.

A number of real estate agents in the historic districts are even optimistic about the prospect of an earlier-than-elsewhere recovery in home values, saying that the factors that drew people Downtown before the boom (cutting commute times, access to culture) haven’t changed.

“I can’t tell you how many people from Mesa and Chandler come to my open houses and say, ‘If we could only sell our house, we’d move down here,’” says Vicki Vanderhoff, an agent who lives in an elaborately high-peaked, Tudor Revival home in Willo. “They don’t mind the downsizing; they want the convenience and the community feel.”

That might be true in neighborhoods like Willo and FQ Story, but it’s hard to picture a bunch of capital-gains-flush empty-nesters flocking to some of the more dicey historic districts such as Garfield, where it’s not uncommon to see La-Z-Boys on the front porch and tin foil used as window treatments. Yet, even if these neighborhoods haven’t achieved the brick-and-mortar redemption of some of the others, at least they enjoy the potential for it with their status as bona fide historic districts.

Phoenix created its last residential historic district in 2005, and voters passed Prop 207 the following year. What was heavily advertised as a way to limit the government’s power of eminent domain also included provisions that required the government to compensate property owners for zoning changes or any other such land-use regulation that might decrease the value of their property. Although just about every economic study shows that historical designation actually increases a property’s value, the city is taking no chances, and in order for any new residential historic district to be created, every homeowner within it would have to waive their right to sue. “There’s just no way,” Stocklin says.

While some homeowners like Vanderhoff contend that the city has already protected its most historically significant districts, try telling that to the fans of mid-century modern homes, whose rectilinear glass-and-block objects of desire are just now starting to reach the age for historic eligibility.

Despite the adversity, it seems that the commitment of historic district residents to their neighborhoods is as strong as ever. There was certainly an ample amount of determination on display among the dozens of volunteers who braved the cold and rain one Sunday morning in February to help out at the first-ever home tour in the Brentwood historic district, a cluster of modest, mostly Tudor and Spanish Colonial Revivals squeezed up against the I-10.

Committee member Andrea del Galdo is scurrying about in a blue windbreaker, a half-forgotten and increasingly bedraggled Marlboro Ultra Light clinched between two fingers as she makes last-minute preparations. Scrappy, tenacious and Brooklyn-born, Del Galdo moved to the Coronado district 15 years ago and three years later bought a 1928 California-style bungalow duplex that had been owned by a meth dealer. She set about converting it and the neighborhood as well, writing grants for things like crime prevention and park renovation and organizing neighbors to patrol the streets early in the morning before work, looking for prostitutes and drug dealers.

“People used to think I was somebody’s meth-head girlfriend,” she says. “I never knew what a tweaker was until I moved here.”

Del Galdo, for one, is sanguine about the future, not least because she didn’t move down here for the real estate, she says, but for the sense of community. As her efforts in the neighborhood began to pay off and the market surged, a sort of HGTV-inspired mania ensued, and she’s not entirely sorry to see that tempered, at least for now.

“Before, it was like ‘I’ve poured new countertops for my kitchen and don’t they look fabulous?’ but now it’s more like, ‘What do you need? How can I help out?’” she says. “Historic preservation is less important to me than neighborhood preservation. I would much rather have a neighborhood that works together than one that just looks pretty and nice.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in GG George’s recollections of her own neighborhood. At the time she bought her house, there were a number of neighbors who had lived through the Depression, whom George describes as “gentlemen of the old school, very courtly men from the ’30s.”

“They saw the good of the whole,” she says. “Whereas today, it seems in a lot of places, more people are concerned with the good of the individual.”

It may just be that the future of historic preservation on Phoenix lies in the spirit of the past.

To see a map prepared by the City of Phoenix Historic Preservation Office of all the historic neighborhoods in Phoenix. Click here.

Mansions That Didn’t Make It - Examples of Downtown-area mansions that were torn down to make way for city growth.

Mansions That Didn’t Make It

Examples of Downtown-area mansions that were torn down to make way for city growth