“People probably have never seen anything like this,” Pytel said. “The real reason to come out is some of the beauty inside Gary’s structures that they may have passed over. There are endless possibilities with all the items that have been reclaimed.” Anyone who’s interested in more information should visit www.delta-institute.org or call Pytel at 312-554-0900.
Heather Eidson The Times
Abandoned and burnt homes stand vacant in this now-barren Gary neighborhood in 2010. Steel City Salvage is training contractors on how to salvage materials from abandoned homes.
The group estimates there’s a $12.8 million market value to salvageable materials sitting untouched in abandoned Gary homes. “Demolition contractors are critically important to supply the marketplace,” Delta Institute Director Eye Pytel said. “While there is a learning curve, training gives contractors the capacity to safely and effectively get the most valuable building materials out of homes.”
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.”