Photo by Construction Junction
On October 29th, I attended the 2019 Deconstruction and Reuse Conference hosted by Construction Junction hoping to find new ways our services could facilitate solutions to economic and environmental issues.
Deconstruction provides a unique opportunity to build communities up by changing the way we tear them down. The idea is simple: when a house or building needs to be demolished, instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and bulldozers, a team of trained individuals comes in and takes apart the building brick by brick, stud by stud. This work takes far more time and training and that means new skilled-labor careers. It has the potential to create an entire economy out of something we are currently calling trash. This is why we believe deconstruction can help us build strong communities while saving the planet and we’ll tell you how we can help.
First, much of the wood and brick can be reused in new construction. In fact, this is already happening in Europe. In the EU an entire deconstruction economy has arisen out of the need and desire to reuse older buildings (their’s are bit older than ours). The opening speaker, Dr. Elma Durmisevic, told us about her endeavor, Building as Material Banks, who have helped develop a process where buildings that are intended to be demolished or deconstructed will be appraised by deconstruction specialists. Those specialists determine what type of raw materials would potentially come out of the building. Once the potential raw materials have been catalogued, then deconstruction companies can bid on the right to perform the work. This work is creating jobs in the digital sector as well. Websites have sprung up to catalog current and future deconstruction efforts to organize the various companies working on deconstruction.
Those companies then take down the building and sell the raw materials to processing plants, who then sell them back to construction companies to use in the next building. This process has saved millions upon millions of tons of waste from ending up in a landfill and has saves on production costs for new materials. In addition, new buildings are being designed with the idea that they should be deconstructed or easily repaired in the future. This new design methodology allows architects to prepare the building for deconstruction before it is even built. Those designs are further catalogued at the outset and each new building is given a score based on its ease of repair and its deconstructability. Those scores factor into the European version of LEED standards and help companies achieve their green goals.
Here in the United States, we are slightly behind our European counterparts. However, the pace of deconstruction development is accelerating. Jackie Kirouac-Fram, the new executive director of the Rebuilding Center in Portland, OR spoke alongside Shawn Wood, the deconstruction program developer for the City of Portland. They were able to work with all of the stakeholders in the city, including demolition crews, developers, and city planners, and passed a groundbreaking measure. In the City of Portland, it is now required to deconstruct any building built before 1917.
That ordinance passed in 2016 and in just 3 short years, the number of demolition permits are half of what they used to be and 17 new deconstruction companies have been formed. The ordinance has thus brought jobs into the city, transformed a sector of the economy, and created a new greener economy in addition to the old one.
In both Pennsylvania and Ohio deconstruction laws are necessary now more than ever. And we can look to other similar cities for how to take the first step. Many post-industrial cities have lost significant population, like Baltimore, which has lost over 400,000 residents in just 30 years. That’s 400,000 people worth of homes and apartments that now sit vacant just in Baltimore alone. Similarly, in rural areas, industry towns die out when the industry dries up, leaving destitute houses in their wakes. The Pacific Northwest continues to have a serious problem with this due to the timber industry drying up.
Then there are the effects of a rapidly changing climate. Rising seas put many of our coastal towns at greater and greater risk. One hundred-year floods now occur every few years, pushing people out of the flood plains. Harsher and more frequent weather events such as blizzards, hurricanes, and heat waves are causing people to migrate within the country and around the world. All of that movement of millions of peoples leaves homes and buildings rotting in its wake. Meanwhile, the population of the country is still growing, so new homes are still being constructed to house the migrating populations.
Deconstruction can and should be embraced. We have a template to make it happen and we want to help our region make that happen. Fair Shake’s staff attorneys have identified a few ways we might be able to help:
We can help community development groups write ordinances for their municipalities that put deconstruction laws into place.
We can work with demolition companies to review the laws, requirements and standards for deconstruction and helping them develop a business model to get off the ground.
We can work with groups or individuals with negotiations to acquire new properties directly from the owners
Help clients of all means navigate the necessary permitting processes with the city or municipality.
Fun Fact:
Pennsylvania has a process by which neighborhood groups can acquire abandoned and blighted properties and transform them into something new. The Abandoned and Blighted Property Act allows non-profit groups and developers to apply to take over blighted properties, do the work necessary to renovate those properties, and then to sell the properties to recoup the costs. Fair Shake can gladly help you navigate this complicated process.
Deconstruction has the capability to substantially lessen the impacts of both issues. It can clean up where humans no longer are and help build where we are moving toward. This can also be coupled with Dr. Durmisevic’s idea that construction should be made with the foresight that the building will be torn down and used to construct something new. Given the ever-increasing risks of natural disasters and our increased need to move around as a society, we need to embrace the idea that our homes are impermanent structures that may need to move. In doing this we may also be able to grow our economy and create some of the much-needed skilled labor jobs our post-industrial region needs.
