Re-using Bflo's abandoned buildings

This is an exciting new initiative in Bflo to divert demolition materials from landfills, just profiled in ARTVOICE:

COPY: http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n29/bri...down_the_house

Bringing Down the House
by Peter Koch

Michael Gainer doesn’t sleep, he waits…and thinks. He’s simply too busy to sleep, and besides, recently he’s got a whole lot to think about—soliciting foundations, screening employment applications, honing his business plan, getting various permits from the city, networking with related organizations and companies, obtaining gap funding and lining up future jobs, to name a few things—the pen-and-paper drudgery required of a budding not-for-profit. Oh yeah, and taking down houses. That last bit may sound outlandish, but it’s not when you consider his organization’s purpose: deconstructing and reusing Buffalo’s worn out buildings. As ambitious a project as it sounds, especially given the 20,000 or more ragged, abandoned buildings in Buffalo, it’s only the tip of the iceberg compared to what Gainer hopes to accomplish with Buffalo ReUse. To understand the scope and vision of the project, you have to speak with Gainer himself, as I did on a recent Friday morning. . . . .

Deconstruction is an alternative to the current standard of building demolition that stresses reusing and recycling as much material as possible, thus diverting it from landfills so it can be resold. Gainer is a big thinker, though, and he sees its potential beyond that. He sees Buffalo ReUse as a vehicle for new job creation, architectural preservation, youth job training, material recycling, as well as several self-sustaining offshoot businesses.

. . . . but after a few months of living in Buffalo, it dawned on him. “I came back and I spent the first month and a half just reading the newspaper accounts of these abandoned and vacant buildings and how the city was going to spend millions of dollars. I thought to myself, ‘This just doesn’t make much sense.’” . . .


Building Buffalo ReUse

By March, Gainer was running with the idea, bouncing it off of folks like Chris Brown and David Granville. He received a grant from the Baird Foundation, which he used to bring Bennick to Buffalo for a two-day community presentation and workshop at the Grant Street Library. . . .

The Baird Foundation grant also covered a down payment on insurance, bought some tools and paid for a trailer. ReUse became licensed with the city in April and immediately got its first two deconstruction jobs—26 Lombard Street and 21 Wasson Street. In total, they’ve obtained more than $250,000 in seed funding from government and private sources, including a grant through Empire State Development’s Environmental Services Division for $187,000. Then, in a huge breakthrough for Buffalo ReUse, the city opened up the demolition process to them, putting out an RFP for 10 deconstructions. ReUse will likely win the contract, and the city will monitor their success (e.g. tonnage of material they divert from the landfill, how much money they spend, how long each deconstruction takes).

“It’s really critical that the city has been so open-minded with the process,” Gainer says, “because they are the ones with the ability to pay.” Gainer wants to turn Buffalo ReUse into a legitimate business venture out of this. . . .

He says that he hopes to match the cost of traditional demolition, but it’s unlikely that Buffalo ReUse will ever be cheaper. “It would be great if we could take down buildings for half the cost, but the point of the matter is that right now you’re paying $10-12K and you’re getting nothing out of it. You’re getting no benefit, except for a vacant lot and fewer people screaming at you.”

When you invest in deconstruction, he continues, it costs the same amount of money but you’re creating jobs in the community, you’re salvaging materials that can be sold back to the community to help other people fix up their houses and, ultimately, he hopes it will become a vehicle for job training. “Then we’ll be providing opportunities for young people during the summer and throughout the year to get good skills training and experience.”
. . . “This well help them get support and skills so they can make ends meet, you know, get involved in the economy and have jobs and live productive lives.” . . .


Miracle on Wasson Street

. . . Looking at the pretty little lot that sits at 21 Wasson Street today, with its blossoming garden and pastoral tranquility, you’d never guess that a moth-balled, century-old duplex had stood there only two months ago.

. . . . Once a deconstruction contract is secured and the permit has been pulled, there’s a straightforward process that Gainer and company use to take down each house. The work goes from the roof down. It is cut into large pieces like a gingerbread house—portions of wall, floor and ceiling. Each piece is individually cut off and lowered to the ground with the telescoping forklift. . . . The house disappears in sections—first the roof, then each wall, followed by the floor, each wall of the ground level and that floor—until only a foundation is left. If there’s a foundation, Buffalo ReUse subcontracts to have it excavated, filled and graded.

It’s dirty work. . . .

Developing disassembly

. . .In fact, it’s the process that Bellingham, Washington-based deconstruction specialist David Bennick has been developing for the past seven years. Though he runs his own deconstruction business, his relatively new role as consultant has recast him as a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, crisscrossing the country and planting the seeds of hybrid deconstruction wherever he goes. . . .

When Bennick first started in deconstruction, 14 years ago, there weren’t a lot of people around in the business. So, as he says, they started taking buildings apart the obvious way—the reverse of building them. “In the beginning, we just salvaged things like cabinets and doors, and then we sort of graduated into taking down our very first building, an agricultural pole building,” he said.

The building was nearly all wood and metal, so Bennick was able to divert 98 percent of it from the landfill. When he compared this to the simple salvaging he’d been doing, he realized that he could make a much bigger environmental impact by offering disassembly of entire buildings. . . . Over time, Bennick refined his system, using safer, insurance-reducing techniques that also allowed him to use volunteers on occasion. And while his business grew in leaps and bounds, Bennick knew that he was on to something that could have a nationwide impact.

To that end, he started a consulting company, RE-USE Consulting. Now he travels the country retraining demolition and deconstruction companies in his hybrid method, as well as helping train new companies like Buffalo ReUse. Bennick sees a lot of potential in Buffalo, though admittedly he sees it differently from most folks. “Though Buffalo’s not exactly a huge forest, it really is a huge stand of processed lumber, ready to processed,” he said, referring to the city’s abundant vacant buildings. “We call demolition a dead end, because it dead ends at the landfill. It doesn’t help the community.” . . .

“There’s a lot of character to this material,” said Bennick, “and Buffalo ReUse is trying to preserve some of the stories of the buildings where it comes from.”


The story goes on

. . . Such was the case with the Horton House at 399 Franklin Street. As this issue goes to press, a hulking excavator is punching out gaping holes in the Civil War-era house’s brick masonry, systematically reducing it to rubble. Though the Preservation Board voted unanimously last November to demolish the historic building, . . . . A month ago, with the permission of demolition contractor Empire Building Diagnostics, Buffalo ReUse volunteers pulled a bounty of materials from the Italianate house in a three-day operation, including more than 30 doors, two clawfoot bathtubs, 15 porcelain sinks, roof brackets and decorative dentil moldings from the façade. Now Gainer is seeking out someone with a similar Italianate house to purchase and install the brackets and dentil molding as a package, thus passing on the Horton House’s 140-year-old legacy. “If you start splitting up the pieces, a couple here and a couple there,” he says, “then it kind of loses some of the character, I think.”

For now, though, they’re stored in a cramped warehouse space at 459 Ellicott Street. . . Located next door to the Washington Market, the Buffalo ReUse warehouse is chocked full of valuable old building materials and hardware. Against one wall are stacks of antique bathtubs and sinks. In another area are rows of solid doors of every stripe. In the back are towering stacks of lumber—floorboards and joists of every size you can imagine. Buffalo ReUse also sells foundation stone and brick, porch columns, hinges, doorknobs, clasps, window openers, window frames and doorframes, fireplace mantles, single-pane windows, double-hung windows, banisters and cabinets. The warehouse is truly stuffed, but luckily these are only temporary digs. Gainer is currently looking for a new, larger warehouse space near the Broadway Market, a move that would put Buffalo ReUse in the geographic center of Buffalo’s highest concentration of abandoned buildings. . . . .

According to Gainer, part of Buffalo ReUse’s goal is not just to sell building materials so they can be used in that purpose again, but to help their customers think outside the box. “We want people to use the materials in applications that they wouldn’t readily associate them with.”


Closing the gap

One major hurdle remains between Buffalo ReUse and all of its high-minded goals—money. There’s a good deal of irony in that fact, too, considering that New York State has already promised them $187,000. That grant works strictly on a reimbursement basis, though, and so far they haven’t found a bank to front the money.

“Our budget is predominantly a labor budget,” Gainer says, “as well as consulting and equipment rental. $25,000 for equipment rental, $10-12,000 for consulting and $170,000 for labor, because it’s labor intensive.” His goal is to have a full-time crew up and running as soon as possible. “That way we can really develop economies of operation and devise best strategies and best ways to do this efficiently. I feel like with our first two houses we showed them that we can get out of the starting blocks, and with all volunteers we can do what we said we could.” Now he wants to improve on that success with a crew of staff who will be focused on outcomes, efficiency and time-benefit analysis. “We need to make sure we get the most material in the most efficient amount of time,” he says, and that’s something that can’t be done with an inconsistent crew of volunteers.

Gainer says that $200,000 would essentially cover a full year’s operations without any other revenue from contracts and sales. “We’re going to have contract revenue on top of that, and we’re going to have sales revenue on top of that, so it’s guaranteed almost two-fold money that we’re asking for. It’s just enough to get us out of the blocks, just enough to float payroll for a few months until the reimbursements start coming in and we get final payment on contracts.” . . . .

For more information, and to keep up to date on Buffalo ReUse, call them at 885-4131 or log on to their Web site at www.buffaloreuse.org