Posted by:
Steve Dubb
House recycling gains prominence as wealth building strategy
Buffalo ReUse and the Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA) are co-sponsoring the first Great Lakes Building ReUse Conference, November 16 through 18, 2008 in Buffalo, New York. People interested in attending can register on line. This will be the first regional conference on developing and implementing building deconstruction and other creative solutions to address problems and solutions surrounding vacant and abandoned structures. Featured presenters include Tyree Guyton of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan; Jay Williams, Mayor of Youngstown, Ohio; Rick Lowe of Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas; and Michael W. Groman of the Philadelphia Green program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Conference organizers see deconstruction as an important mechanism to meet the challenges that many U.S. cities face due to a rising tide of vacant land and buildings. As Chris Beck, a consultant, and Preston Browning, a program manager for Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid group, who were working on recovery work in New Orleans noted in a November 2006 New York Times article, deconstruction involves taking houses “apart piece by piece and then selling or salvaging the reusable building materials, such as floorboards, roof beams and fireplace mantles.”
Beck and Browning note that The ReBuilding Center in Portland, Oregon between 1999 and 2006 salvaged building materials from more than 600 construction sites and completely deconstructed more than 125 houses. In doing this, the Center not only kept 4.5 million pounds of materials out of landfills, but by training and employing local workers, the nonprofit center has helped revive one of the city’s lower-income neighborhoods.
Now the deconstruction movement is growing. In Cleveland, Ohio, The Cleveland Foundation has initiated a $75,000 pilot project, involving a partnership between the Foundation; Hard-Hatted Women, a nonprofit organization that seeks to assist women pursue non-traditional construction trades careers; Neighborhood Progress, Inc., a local community development intermediary; and BMRA, the national trade association.
The project in Cleveland has also received national attention. As this New York Times magazine article pointed out last month, The City of Cleveland has over 8,000 vacant lots and currently spends $9 million a year to demolish 1,100 houses a year. The articles acknowledges that a key drawback of deconstruction is that it is labor intensive. But as writer Jon Mooallem notes,"in Cleveland the drawback of deconstruction ... that it takes two weeks and a dozen wage earners to do what a piece of hydraulic machinery accomplishes before lunch — was actually a selling point. The Cleveland Foundation was attracted to deconstruction as a way to provide jobs and job training in a county where unemployment is high and 5,000 ex-offenders surge out of prison every year. As a concept, at least, it fit nicely into the city’s effort to become a cradle for sustainable industries and green-collar jobs.