Listing on the National Register: Criteria and Process

The National Register of Historic Places is a list, not a set of controls. Getting onto it turns on two questions asked in order. Does the property still look and stand enough like itself to show why it mattered, and does it meet one of four stated criteria. A property that fails the first question cannot be rescued by an excellent argument on the second.

The four criteria and what each tests

Section 60.4 of Title 36 states the criteria. Criterion A covers properties associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of history. Criterion B covers association with the lives of persons significant in the past. Criterion C covers properties that embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period or method of construction, that represent the work of a master, that possess high artistic values, or that form a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction. Criterion D covers properties that have yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in history or prehistory.

One criterion is enough. Many nominations claim two or three, and there is no advantage in stacking weak arguments beside a strong one. What each criterion demands is a specific claim tied to a stated period and a stated level of significance, which may be local, state or national. A nomination that says a building is old and attractive has not made a claim under any of the four.

Integrity and its seven aspects

Integrity is the ability of a property to convey its significance. The regulation lists seven aspects: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling and association. Not all seven must survive intact. The question is which aspects matter for the particular claim being made, and whether those aspects remain.

An archaeological site nominated under Criterion D may have almost no design or workmanship left above ground and still be listed, because what it must convey is buried information. A building nominated as the work of a master architect is judged hard on design, materials and workmanship, and a re-clad exterior can end the case. Setting is the aspect most often lost through no act of the owner, when everything around a property changes.

The route a nomination travels

Most nominations start with a preparer and go to the State Historic Preservation Officer. That office reviews the documentation, and if it is adequate, schedules the nomination before the state review board, a panel of professionals in history, architecture, architectural history, archaeology and related fields. Before the board meets, the officer must notify the owner or owners, the applicable chief elected local official, and give an opportunity to comment.

If the board finds the property meets the criteria and the officer agrees, the nomination goes to the Keeper of the National Register at the National Park Service. The Keeper lists or rejects it. Federally owned property follows the separate route in section 60.9, running through the agency's Federal Preservation Officer rather than the state.

The documentation itself is standardized and unforgiving. A nomination states the property's boundary and justifies it, describes the resource in enough detail that a reader who has never seen it can picture what stands there, distinguishes contributing from non-contributing resources within a district, and places the property in a historic context that explains why the claimed significance is significant. Photographs and mapping must show what the narrative asserts. Nominations are returned far more often for thin context statements and unjustified boundaries than for weak arguments about the criteria.

Owner notification and the objection that blocks a listing

Owner consent is not required to nominate, but owner objection is decisive. Under section 60.6, if the owner of a private property submits a notarized statement objecting, the property is not listed. In a district, the listing is blocked only when a majority of private owners of record object, counted one vote per owner regardless of the number of parcels held.

The objection does not end the inquiry. Where a nomination is blocked this way, it is forwarded to the Keeper for a determination of eligibility. A property determined eligible but not listed is treated the same as a listed property for federal review purposes, which is why owners who object to avoid federal attention often achieve nothing. The relationship between eligibility and listing is set out in determining eligibility without a completed nomination.

What follows once a property is listed

Districts deserve a separate word because they behave differently from individual listings. A district has a boundary, and inside it every resource is classified as contributing or non-contributing to the significance for which the district was listed. A building constructed after the period of significance sits inside the boundary without contributing to it, and the classification matters later for incentives and for effect assessment. Owners inside a district are often unaware their property is included, because notification obligations attach to the nomination rather than to every subsequent transaction.

Listing is a status, and its practical consequences are narrower than most owners expect. It does not restrict what a private owner does with private money, a point developed in the difference between listing and regulation. It does bring the property into the federal review process whenever a federal agency funds, permits or licenses a project that could affect it.

Listing also opens doors that are otherwise shut. A certified historic structure for federal rehabilitation credit purposes is defined by reference to the Register, and the certification sequence is covered in the rehabilitation credit and its three-part certification. The restrictions owners actually feel day to day usually come from a separate municipal designation, described in local landmark designation and the certificate of appropriateness. Where a listed property is also subject to a recorded easement, those terms bind independently, as set out in preservation easements and their duration.