“It’s much more oriented toward local governments and economic development practitioners,” who are looking at the steps community leaders can take to encourage greater deconstruction, Pytel said. “Waste is typically a consequence of a bunch of other decisions. We’re going up a few levels to get at the decisions that end up creating waste, as opposed to looking at things as waste to begin with.”
Source: Nonprofit touts benefits of housing deconstruction over demolition | Waste Dive
“We wanted to leverage that project to understand what things were valuable in Gary’s homes. We took advantage of a project the city already was doing to establish that hypothesis,” said Pytel. “The direct market value of building materials could be as high as $13 million. It shouldn’t just be going to landfill.”
Source: Vacant means vintage to Gary grant winner – Post-Tribune
The city and the Delta Institute’s Steel City Salvage project just won a $385,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to deconstruct homes and recycle the building materials like lumber and architectural features. It was the largest individual grant out of the $5 million awarded in the Knight Cities Challenge, which had attracted more than 4,500 proposals from across the country.
“This is not simply about the demolition of vacant and abandoned buildings,” Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson said. “But it promotes the deconstruction of vacant and abandoned buildings, as well as the repurposing and recycling of the material. One of the things we know about the city of Gary is there are beautiful homes here that have fallen into disrepair, that cannot be repurposed but the materials in those homes can certainly be reused for something else.”
Detroit has a rich history and that can be seen in the housing materials we are trying to save. Bricks and wood particularly are incredibly valuable in these homes and it would be awful to see them end up in landfills.
Site selection is key to the success of deconstruction. It is important to select areas in neighborhoods where community members will remain engaged and will keep an eye on properties. This will reduce vandalism and burned materials, which can make this process challenging.
