Is your house historic—officially, as in listed on the National Register of Historic Places?

In Oregon, nominating a house to the register is solely up to the owner, unless one person—anybody—can convince the Portland Landmarks Commission and National Park Service that your entire neighborhood is historic.

If an effort by the Eastmoreland Neighborhood Association to create a new national historic district is successful, hundreds of property owners could find their houses listed. The reason has less to do with traditional historic preservation than with stopping demolitions, new infill housing, and “monster homes.”

“The board's worked hard for about three years to try to get the city to deal with this through coding, zoning, and through the comprehensive plan,” says Eastmoreland’s president, Tom Hanson. “While we had considered historic district designation in the past, we had thought the other mechanisms were more appropriate to work through the city. But when they were not fruitful, then we moved to considering historic district designation.”

But National Historic District protection comes with strict rules, design review and permit fees. For instance, if your house is designated a “contributing resource”—meaning it’s original and in the character of Eastmoreland’s ‘20s-era architecture—you might not be able to put energy efficient fiberglass windows in or solar panels or a skylight on your roof if it’s visible from the street. And, if you want to build something with those giant sliding glass doors like you see in Dwell magazine, forget it. It’s unlikely to be “compatible.”

A group calling itself Keep Eastmoreland Free has formed to stop the effort to nominate the neighborhood. They point out that fewer than 1 percent of Eastmoreland’s 1,500 or so homes have been demolished since 2003. The phrase they like to use is that they “don’t want their neighborhood pickled.”

“Eastmoreland was built and is continuing to evolve for 100 plus years,” says longtime resident Mary Kyle McCurdy. “We have all sorts of architectural styles here. There's isn't any one consistent theme or time period in which this was built or the houses were designed. So to call us all in one Historic District and freeze it now? Why freeze it in 2016?”

What’s interesting—and where a lot of the heartburn arises—is in the process of creating national historic districts. The only way the residents of the neighborhood can stop it is by gathering notarized petitions from the landowners—50 percent of them plus 1. Imagine a presidential election in which your only way of voting is by going to your bank and notarizing your ballot before mailing it in—all to vote for the candidate you don’t like.