Historic Preservation & Affordable Housing: Myth vs. Reality

Join DCPL and PlaceEconomics online to bust some preservation myths! In this presentation, speaker Alyssa Frystak will address some of the common misconceptions surrounding historic preservation and affordable housing using data-driven findings from PlaceEconomics work. She will demonstrate how historic preservation and older housing can play a key role in helping to alleviate the affordable housing crisis.

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Alyssa Frystak is the Director of Research and Data Analytics at PlaceEconomics, a Washington, D.C. based research firm specializing in the analysis of the economic impacts of historic preservation. There she is responsible for data acquisition and preparation, methodology development, and analysis. Alyssa is well versed in GIS, census data, municipal data, as well as various other data resources. She is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the inaugural recipient of the Mencoff Family Fellowship in Historic Preservation. Her Master’s thesis, “Small but Mighty: Combatting the Affordable Housing Crisis Through Small-Scale Historic Rehabilitation,” examined the tools, incentives, and policies that help preserve and create subsidized and unsubsidized affordable housing in designated and non-designated buildings. She currently serves as the Chair of the Skyline Council of Landmarks Illinois.