Property rights in Wichita: Your roof

The Wichita City Council will attempt to settle a dispute concerning whether a new roof should be allowed to have a vertical appearance rather than the horizontal appearance of the old.

Tomorrow the Wichita City Council will be asked to uphold a decision of the Historic Preservation Board (HPB) regarding the characteristics of a roof someone installed on their house. Here’s material from the agenda packet for the meeting:

Analysis: By a 4-0-1 vote, the HPB found the installation of the metal panel roof does encroach upon, damage and destroy the Park Place Fairview Historic District by installing a non-traditional roofing material and altering the horizontal pattern of the roof shingles which is a character-defining feature of the house. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards #2 and #3 specifically deal with the character of the building itself. There is no evidence in historic Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, historic aerial photographs of the property, or historic building permit records that 1500 North Park Place ever had a metal panel or standing seam metal roof. There is no evidence of the property’s roof structure that this house ever had anything other than cedar shingles or composite singles. The issue is not with the metal material, it is with the metal sheet which gives a vertical appearance given to a roof that had a horizontal appearance. The design guidelines adopted by City Council for this historic district do not mention metal panel roofing material as appropriate material for this district (Section 2.12.1021.1 of the Wichita Code of Ordinances). The applicant did not provide an option to use metal shingles that would have the same appearance as the existing shingle roof.

Since the property is a contributing structure in the WRHP, the RHKP and the NRHP, the metal panel roof cannot proceed without the City Council finding that there are not any “feasible and prudent alternatives” to the metal panel roofing material.