A few years ago, a Sonic Drive-In went up in Beauregard Town. To make room for it, a house came down. No public hearing, no design review, no chance for neighbors to weigh in on what replaced it. "Sonic came in and tore down a house and there wasn't much thought given to it," neighborhood civic association president Jeff Kuehny said afterward, describing it as one of several structures the neighborhood had lost to neglect or demolition over the years.
Two blocks away, in Spanish Town, the same teardown could not happen without a hearing before the Historic Preservation Commission. Same city. Same era of housing stock. Same word on the real estate listing. Completely different set of rules.
That gap is the thing buyers comparing these downtown-adjacent neighborhoods usually don't know to ask about, and it changes what you can do to a house, how long a renovation permit takes, and how much a street's character is actually protected from what happens next door.
One Label, Three Legal Realities
Baton Rouge has eight National Register Historic Districts, including Spanish Town, Beauregard Town, Drehr Place, and Roseland Terrace. National Register listing is largely honorary. It can unlock federal tax credits for renovating historic structures, but it does not give any commission the power to approve or deny what an owner does to the exterior of a house.
Local historic district status is a different thing entirely. It comes with a Certificate of Appropriateness requirement, meaning any exterior change visible from the street has to pass through the city's Historic Preservation Commission, either at the staff level or through a public hearing, according to the city's own COA guidance. Only Spanish Town and Drehr Place currently carry both designations. Beauregard Town, despite being federally recognized since 1980, does not.
| Neighborhood | National Register status | Local design review (COA required) | Neighborhood founded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish Town | Listed 1978 | Yes, since 2008 | 1805 |
| Beauregard Town | Listed 1980 | No, rejected 2022 | 1806 |
Drehr Place, part of the Garden District, carries the same local COA requirement as Spanish Town. Beauregard Town is the outlier of the three: founded only a year after Spanish Town, federally listed just two years later, and still the only one of the three where an owner can alter or demolish a street-facing structure without a design hearing.
City planning director Frank Duke put the difference plainly back when Beauregard Town first floated the idea of joining the other two: "Spanish Town and Drehr Place choose to protect everything, including trees," he told The Advocate in 2019. Beauregard Town's proposal, by contrast, was described by the planning department as "historic district light," a version that would have only required review for new construction, demolitions, and street-facing additions rather than every visible change.
What a Certificate of Appropriateness Actually Requires
For a homeowner in one of Baton Rouge's two locally designated districts, a Certificate of Appropriateness is not optional paperwork. Under the framework Beauregard Town's civic association proposed in its own application, changes that don't require a building permit can be approved by the planning director at no cost. Changes that do require a permit carry a $200 fee to advertise the required public hearing, and if construction starts before the COA is issued, a $100 penalty gets added on top, according to details published on the Beauregard Town Civic Association's site.
The Historic Preservation Commission itself is a seven-member body created by the Metro Council in 2004, and it meets just once a month, on the first Wednesday. That single monthly meeting is the bottleneck. A homeowner who wants to swap out a front door, add a rear addition, or replace deteriorated siding on a street-facing wall in Spanish Town has to time that work around the commission's calendar, not their contractor's.
Beauregard Town homeowners face none of this. A window replacement, a new roofline, even a full teardown and rebuild, so long as it complies with ordinary zoning and building permit rules, does not require anyone's design approval.
Why Beauregard Town Never Got the Same Layer
This isn't an oversight. Beauregard Town has tried more than once, across nearly two decades.
The first serious push began in 2019, when the Planning Commission used a $17,500 grant from the Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation to survey the neighborhood's 517 structures and draft design guidelines. By 2022, the effort reached a public vote, and it split the neighborhood. Supporters argued the designation would lock in property values and prevent the kind of casual demolition the Sonic lot represented. "The economic impact of historic districts is to provide a degree of protection to the value of what most people hold dear to being one of the most significant financial assets they'll have in their life," Kuehny told the commission.
Opponents saw it differently. Signs opposing the designation appeared on lawns across the neighborhood ahead of the vote. "There are that many people, or more than that, that are afraid of the restrictions and the penalties that are going to come to them, if they don't maintain their homes to a certain standard," resident Shirley Bowler said at the time, according to WAFB's coverage.
The Planning Commission voted unanimously to deny the application in August 2022. Commissioner Clifford Grout summed up the room's mood before seconding the motion: "This is not enhancing this community, it's tearing it apart." The effort had been alive in some form since 2009, one year after Spanish Town's own local designation took effect.
Regulation Doesn't Stop Decay, It Shapes the Fix
None of this means Spanish Town's protections solve every problem a buyer might worry about. In January 2026, WAFB reported on three deteriorating homes in Spanish Town that had drawn neighbor complaints about blight for roughly five years. Gregg Bailey of the Historic Spanish Town Civic Association called them "three of the worst of the worst." One of the owners, Michael Doiron, said he had already made repairs but that termites had eaten through the studs holding the stucco in place, which is why the exterior kept crumbling.
The design review process governs what a fix has to look like once it happens. It doesn't compel an owner to make repairs on any particular timeline, and it doesn't protect a house from termite damage, deferred maintenance, or a slow-moving owner. What it does is prevent a neighbor from tearing the same house down and putting up something incompatible with the block, or from stripping period details during a renovation without anyone weighing in first.
What This Means If You're Comparing These Streets
If you're choosing between a house in Spanish Town, Drehr Place, and Beauregard Town, you're really choosing between three different levels of certainty about what the street will look like in ten years. In the two locally designated districts, you're buying into a slower, more predictable renovation process and a stronger guarantee that your neighbor's remodel or rebuild will be reviewed against the same design guidelines yours would be. In Beauregard Town, you're buying more flexibility to move faster on your own project, along with the reality that a neighboring lot could see a teardown with no public process attached to it.
Neither model is right or wrong. It depends on what you're optimizing for: speed and lower renovation friction, or predictability and design continuity across the block.
Across East Baton Rouge Parish generally, the market underneath all of this has stayed active. The median sale price over the three months ending May 2026 was $292,000, up 6.2 percent from the same period a year earlier, with homes taking an average of 44 days to sell. Older, character-driven inventory downtown tends to move on its own timeline within that broader parish trend, shaped as much by condition and location as by the district label on the listing.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Make an Offer
Does National Register listing alone mean I need approval to change my house? No. National Register status by itself does not trigger any local review. Only a locally designated historic district, currently Spanish Town and Drehr Place in this part of town, requires a Certificate of Appropriateness for street-visible exterior work.
How long should I budget for a renovation permit in Spanish Town or Drehr Place? Plan around the Historic Preservation Commission's monthly meeting schedule. A straightforward staff-level approval can move quickly, but anything requiring a public hearing needs to be timed to the commission's calendar, and complex projects can add weeks to a standard permitting timeline.
Could Beauregard Town still become a locally protected district someday? The Planning Commission's 2022 denial ended that specific application, but interest in the idea goes back further, with discussions surfacing as early as 2009, the year after Spanish Town's own local designation took effect. Whether a future effort succeeds would depend on the same kind of neighborhood-wide agreement that split the vote last time.
If you're weighing one of these downtown neighborhoods against a suburban lot in Baton Rouge, Prairieville, or Gonzales, the honest answer is that the right fit depends on how much certainty you want over what happens on the block around you, not just inside your own front door. That's exactly the kind of conversation worth having before you write an offer, not after. Jodie B. Strain has spent 21 years walking Baton Rouge buyers through decisions like this one. Let's Connect.
