How to Save a House and Create a Home

The current Independent Weekly has a cover story on Builders of Hope. Bob Geary begins the story this way, embedding the beginning of the real story here.

It wasn't only the spike in Raleigh teardowns, though the sight of perfectly habitable homes being reduced to rubble helped Nancy Murray settle on a strategy. She already was on a mission to learn all she could about affordable housing and how to build it. Call it audacity, call it a ministry, but Murray—an advertising executive turned builder and social activist—thought she could supply top-drawer, affordable houses in good neighborhoods to working-class families.

Then it clicked: Murray would save the homes imperiled by teardowns and have them moved to a new location. She would upgrade them using the best green techniques while preserving as much of their old wooden bones as possible, then sell the houses at prices high enough to recapture the costs but below their new appraised values.

Such was the genesis—the biblical as well as temporal meaning—of the nonprofit organization Murray created in 2006, Builders of Hope.

This most amazing story of hope becoming reality can be read here. The chance for hope to recycle itself into the future is the best development of all.

An Over the Top Award to Builders of Hope for this Positive Development.

A Fine Reason to Go to Oakwood Tonight

Preservation Calendar
Raleigh -- Community Conversations Series With Adrian Fine
TALKS

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 @ 07:00 PM

Community Conversations Series
Adrian Fine, National Trust for Historic Preservation
The National Trust's teardown guru discusses how lessons from around the country can be applied to Raleigh.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008, 7:00-9:00 pm,
St. Augustine's College Chapel, 1315 Oakwood Avenue, Raleigh
Free and open to the public
Sponsored by the Raleigh Historic Districts Commission and Preservation NC

If you have not noticed, the momentum is gathering around the issue of what is good infill and what is a problem. Tonight Raleigh has a rare opportunity to hear -- from the National Trust for Historic Preservation -- what they have learned around the country. Yes, this is not just a local problem, and by bringing in a larger perspective, Raleigh has a chance to learn how to balance growth and preservation – before it is too late.

Announcing "Community Conversations"

Community Conversations

Please join us for the first event in the Community Conversations series.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 

7:00-9:00 PM

Adrian Scott Fine, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Teardowns: Finding the Right Balance

Cities and towns across the country are wrestling with finding the appropriate response to infill issues. Hear about how the market is affecting the debate, the responses from communities, new tools to address the issue, and its role in the larger sustainability challenge.

St. Augustine’s College Chapel

1315 Oakwood Ave, Raleigh

Stay after the lecture to continue the conversation with your friends and neighbors.

Sustainable Design

Preservation is Sustainability
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04.07.08
DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE | treehugger.com

Speaking at Bernard Maybeck's historic First Church of Christ, Scientist in Berkeley, the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Richard Moe, made an historic speech about how saving old buildings is not about the past, but the future.

In the speech he notes that existing buildings"are vast respositories of energy." "It takes energy to manufacture to extract building materials, more energy to transport them to a construction site, still more energy to assemble them into a building," he says. "All of that energy is embodied in the finished structure — and if the structure is demolished and landfilled, the energy locked up in it is totally wasted." He calculates that even if 40% of the materials in a new building are recycled, it would take 65 years for "green, energy-efficient new office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing an existing building,

From the speech, on the meaning of preservation:

"I'll begin with a reminder of what historic preservation is all about. When you strip away the rhetoric, preservation is simply having the good sense to hold on to things that are well designed, that link us with our past in a meaningful way, and that have plenty of good use left in them."

On current planning:

One of the first and most important things that must happen is a thoroughgoing revision of current government policies that foster unsustainable development. For decades, national, state and local policies have facilitated – even encouraged – the development of new suburbs while leaving existing communities behind. As a result, an epidemic of sprawl ravages the countryside, devouring open space and demanding new infrastructure. Look at almost any city in the country, and you'll see new houses springing up in rural areas that are underserved by roads and public services – while in the urban core, disinvestment has left viable housing stock abandoned in areas where infrastructure is already in place, already paid for.

It makes no sense for us to recycle newsprint and bottles and aluminum cans while we're throwing away entire buildings, or even entire neighborhoods. This pattern of development is fiscally irresponsible, environmentally disastrous, and ultimately unsustainable.

On old buildings being green:

"The key phrase is "sustainable stewardship."

The retention and reuse of older buildings is an effective tool for the responsible, sustainable stewardship of our environmental resources – including those that have already been expended. I'm talking about what's called "embodied energy."

Here's the concept in a nutshell: Buildings are vast repositories of energy. It takes energy to manufacture or extract building materials, more energy to transport them to a construction site, still more energy to assemble them into a building. All of that energy is embodied in the finished structure – and if the structure is demolished and landfilled, the energy locked up in it is totally wasted. What's more, the process of demolition itself uses more energy – and, of course, the construction of a new building in its place uses more yet.

Let me give you some numbers that will translate that concept into reality.

* According to a formula produced for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, about 80 billion BTUs of energy are embodied in a typical 50,000-square-foot commercial building. That's the equivalent of 640,000 gallons of gasoline. If you tear the building down, all of that embodied energy is wasted.

* What's more, demolishing that same 50,000-square-foot building would create nearly 4,000 tons of waste. That's enough debris to fill 26 railroad boxcars – a train nearly a quarter of a mile long, headed for a landfill that is already almost full.

* Once the old building is gone, putting up a new one in its place takes more energy, of course, and it also uses more natural resources and releases new pollutants and greenhouse gases into our environment. It is estimated that constructing a 50,000-square-foot commercial building releases about the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as driving a car 2.8 million miles.

* One more point: You might think that all the energy used in demolishing an older building and replacing it is offset by the increased energy efficiency of the new building – but that's simply not true. Recent research indicates that even if 40% of the materials are recycled, it takes approximately 65 years for a green, energy-efficient new office building to recover the energy lost in demolishing an existing building. And let's face it: Most new buildings aren't designed to last anywhere near 65 years." Read it all at ::preservation nation via ::WFFA

See also Big Steps in Building: Ban Demolition and Demolition by Neglect: Use It or Lose It

Well, Well, Well

Snippets from Metropolitan Home
Bigger Isn't Always Better
Communities across the U.S. are taking action against the supersize houses invading their front and backyards
Written by Peter Hellman

The good news is that grassroots anti- McMansionists are fighting back. Often, they’re out ahead of local government when it comes to preserving the character of their communities. In the architecturally rich, fully built-out Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, for example, village officials did nothing as more than a dozen Victorian and Prairie-style homes were demolished to make way for McMansions. “A bunch of us residents decided we wanted our officials to get more involved in the loss of these significant older homes,” says longtime village resident Jackie Bossu. “But their response was that they couldn’t do anything so long as our 1969 zoning law wasn’t being violated. They were just running on autopilot.”

Responding to rising citizen dismay, the village’s building review committee called a meeting on teardowns in late 2003. “It was a weekday evening, but more than 200 residents showed up, even though we have only 830 homes,” Bossu says. Belatedly, regulations were adapted to the new speculative realities, including a required “cooling-off period” for teardown permits. FAR computations were also changed to benefit existing homes rather than new construction, so owners have less temptation to sell out. And so-called snout garages, which protrude from facades of new homes (sometimes called Garage Mahals), were banned. This year, Kenilworth expects to have a revised code that is tilted toward preservation of the village’s traditional fabric rather than teardowns.

In booming Dallas, a city with a surprisingly large reservoir of pre-war houses, the last few years have seen more than 1,000 teardowns (exceeding the size of Kenilworth’s entire housing stock). “It’s not just a problem of new houses being out of scale and proportion with others on the block, but of materials and style,” says Katherine Seale, director of the civic group Preservation Dallas. In a neighborhood of low, wood-framed bungalows you’ll get a limestone-faced, two-and-a-half-story house with a large faux Frenchstyle turret. It’s so discordant.” Seale hastens to say that “building new houses in existing neighborhoods can be compatible, and lots of architects have figured out how to do it.” But too often, they don’t.

The most potent factor in the invasion of McMansions on urban infill is the rising cost of land. A modest old home on a highly valuable lot is teardown bait to a speculative builder. The new house he’ll build will be proportionately more expensive in keeping with the cost of the land. “When you buy a teardown in New York, or Washington or San Francisco, places with very high property values, you’ll build a house worth three or four times the price of the land, so you’ve got to build an awfully big house,” says architect Sarah Susanka. “Some of the most beautiful inner-ring suburbs are being lost before our eyes to these humongous houses dumped into their midst. And yet, it’s often unintentional. People see a plan in an architectural grocery store and say, gee, that’s lovely. But just because something looks good in its own isolated setting doesn’t mean it’s going to work where houses are densely packed.”

And it’s not only new houses but the expansion of existing ones whose new bulk can dominate their neighbors. “People will keep one stud from the original house to call it remodeling and then build a massive house,” says Susanka. “They’re determined to get every square inch out of their valuable lot,” says Susanka, whose 1998 broadside against houses with too much unused space, The Not So Big House, will be published in an updated tenth-anniversary edition this year.

Invoking the mantra of sustainability, Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute, a Boston-based land-use think tank, argues that big new homes on urban infill can actually be a good thing: “You have folks who will say that its better to build close to town where land can be reused and the infrastructure exists rather than building it out in the cornfields.” Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Places, disagrees. “It’s good that people want to move closer to town, but not when they bring their suburban sensibilities to historic districts,” he says. The large houses that they left behind “aren’t designed to fit in these differently scaled neighborhoods.”

The graceful neighborhoods now under siege from McMansions, it’s worth remembering, were created not so much by regulation as by an earlier generation’s sense of style, proportion and landscaping. “What we’re trying to do is not about judging someone for having too large a home, but what’s appropriate for a community that’s been here for more than 100 years,” says Lauren Norton, an Atlanta preservationist.

And what are cities trying:

A task force in [Atlanta] did create a new set of regulations on square footage that should bring down the size of many homes. In Dallas, new Neighborhood Stabilization Overlay Zones allow residents to decide what they’ll permit, and what they won’t, when new buildings are to be erected. In Minneapolis, home footprints are now limited to 50 percent of lot size. In Boulder County, Colorado, where home size averages a gigantic 6,500 square feet, a bold plan is afoot to create a system of transferring square footage rights from small houses to large houses.

In Raleigh, the first step is still admitting we have a problem.

Are Teardowns Dangerous?

Two words:
Lead and Asbestos



Two places:
On-site and the Landfill


That is a school across the street.




For the uninitiated, these are asbestos pipe wrappings.



SAFETY MEASURES



Pictures taken June 27, 8 am.

For more information on this topic:

Forum in Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Environmental Report in Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Construction and demolition debris management North Carolina

Asbestos in North Carolina