Neighborhood Progress, Inc.: Responsible Demolition in Cleveland

Ohio is one of the states hardest hit by foreclosures, driven by the combined forces of the national housing slump, the economic recession and long-term erosion of manufacturing jobs. While some foreclosed homes will be purchased and restored to use, many others will fall prey to vandals who strip them for their copper and leave them open to the elements. For these homes, demolition will likely be the most viable option economically. Yet the explosion of vacant, abandoned homes requires a dramatic increase in demolition. Cleveland alone has an estimated 11,500 vacant homes, with numbers expected to mount in the next 2 to 3 years. The city demolished just 195 houses in 2005, but in 2007 it took down 950 homes and plans to raze as many as 1,700 in 2009.¹

It is easy enough to knock down buildings, but how do you dispose of the resulting debris in a responsible way? Cleveland’s landfills have dwindling capacity, and even a modest house represents 31–32 tons of bulky materials (not including the concrete, which may increase weight by as much as 40 percent)². Moreover, the building industry is setting increasingly higher standards for “green” disposal of construction debris. Diverting reusable flooring, siding, insulation, drywall and other building materials out of landfills reduces pressure on landfills and can generate affordable building materials for homeowners shopping for bargains. Habitat for Humanities’ ReStores is an effort to capture a portion of this market. There are plenty of small-scale salvage jobs or deconstruction taking place on a unit-by-unit basis, but the challenge in Cleveland is bringing it to a scale that makes it a viable alternative to straight demolition.

Frank Ford is senior vice president at Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI), a Cleveland nonprofit that uses a range of innovative programs to strengthen Cleveland neighborhoods. Neighborhood Progress, Inc. had no prior experience with deconstruction, but in spring of 2008 was asked by the Cleveland Foundation to oversee the deconstruction of two houses as a pilot project. Using deconstruction as an alternative to demolition raised a number of questions:
1. Can large-scale deconstruction efforts deliver costs that are equal to or less than standard demolition?
2. Can deconstruction be a “greener” solution by diverting less material to landfills?
3. Can we create a market for reclaimed materials?
4. Because deconstruction is so labor intensive, does it present an opportunity for creation of entry-level jobs?
5. Can deconstruction be done in a way that protects the health and safety of workers as well as the neighborhoods in which the housing is located?

For a variety of reasons this first pilot project was not a success. Done mostly by hand, the process took twice as long as planned (4 weeks per house instead of 2), and safety was a constant concern. “A halfway deconstructed house is far more dangerous than an abandoned house,” observes Ford. “It becomes an ‘attractive nuisance’ to neighborhood children, so every day before the workers left the site we had to make sure it was well secured.” Ford also notes that it costs, on average, about $10,000 to demolish a house and truck the debris to a landfill, but because it took so long the deconstruction was far more expensive. Unless they could find a faster way to dismantle houses, deconstruction was going to be too expensive and hazardous a solution.

Enter Dave Bennink and RE-USE Consulting, a company dedicated to finding sustainable alternatives to demolition. Bennink proposed using what he calls “hybrid deconstruction,” which combines use of people and machines to deconstruct buildings more efficiently. The approach involves sawing through the wall joints to create panels, which can then be lifted off with a crane and placed on the ground where workers can dismantle them quickly and safely. Neighborhood Progress, Inc. working with the newly formed Urban Lumberjacks of Cleveland, worked with Bennink to deconstruct two more houses in late 2008 and found that it significantly reduced the deconstruction time, from 8 weeks to 11 days. However, the cost per house was still more than a straight demolition.

Nevertheless, on the strength of this experience, staff from the Mayor’s Office at the City of Cleveland approached Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and offered to fund a slightly larger pilot, involving six houses, for which it would pay an average of $10,000 each plus a $4,000 differential. The goal of this was to continue searching for strategies to reduce the deconstruction period to 5 weekdays, which would keep costs down and minimize safety and security issues. Ford recalls that the first two houses came in at just under $25,000 each, but the next two were $17,000 each. Ultimately, Urban Lumberjacks did manage to complete the deconstruction in 5 weekdays and reduced the average cost to about $14,000 (actual costs per house vary by square footage).

In October 2009 the City of Cleveland proposed to contract with NPI to deconstruct 40 houses, for which they would again be paid $10,000 each with a $4,000 differential. While they are still negotiating the terms, Ford thinks Neighborhood Progress, Inc. will agree to take this on. This would be a year-long project, with houses being completed at the rate of about one a week except in the coldest winter months. Worker safety is still a concern due to Cleveland’s subfreezing temperatures, as snow and ice can make site conditions hazardous. An intriguing solution for the winter might be to load the wall panels onto a flatbed truck and bring them to a warehouse where they can be dismantled in dry, climate-controlled conditions, sort of the reverse of the manufactured housing process. Chris Kious, of Urban Lumberjacks, thinks that processing materials inside would reduce their labor and insurance costs. Another advantage to this approach is that, if the warehouse were large enough, the reusable materials could be sold right on the premises. The warehouse would need to be centrally located in order to reduce travel time and costs.

Not every house is a good target for deconstruction, so that traditional demolition contractors will still be needed. Kious says homes that have large trees, power lines, or other buildings right next to them will pose problems for his heavy equipment; a quick drive-by will be enough to eliminate those as prospects. The next thing he checks for is glued linoleum over wood floors, which impedes processing and renders flooring useless. Fire damage, or wood rot due to leaky roofs, reduces the amount of salvageable materials and makes homes unsafe to work in, so Kious will reject those as well. Finally, asbestos in the walls is expensive to abate so he will avoid those homes, though asbestos around pipes is quick and easy to deal with and does not cause a problem. Lead paint is another commonly encountered hazard; they just try to minimize the dust during deconstruction and process lead-filled surfaces appropriately to protect the health of workers and the neighbors.

The response to the five questions posed above around the value of deconstruction, is a cautious “yes,” but many questions and challenges remain. Deconstructing homes and salvaging reusable materials can keep some demolition debris out of landfills, although it is hard to measure the volume that is diverted. There does seem to be growing interest in reuse of salvaged materials, but there is a challenge to delivering enough materials (dimensional lumber for example) to complete a large-scale job, and storage of materials is a challenge. Smaller, specialty uses offer a partial solution. Urban Lumberjacks has started “A Piece of Cleveland,” a furniture-making business that uses reclaimed wood from deconstructed homes.

Deconstruction costs have come down significantly since Neighborhood Progress Inc’s first foray into dismantling homes by hand. Since working in Cleveland, Bennink has deconstructed two homes in four 10-hour days (not including denailing boards or foundation work) using 4.5 people per day, which brings the process closer to the cost of straight demolition. One caveat is that the machinery and equipment required to be competitive requires a steep upfront investment. Nevertheless, when coupled with other cost savings or measurable society benefits such as the avoided cost of building new landfills, or the reduced environmental impact of cutting and processing lumber from forests, large-scale deconstruction appears even more attractive. Deconstruction does offer entry-level jobs, and learning how to deconstruct a house could be a valuable precursor to learning how to put one together. The experience in the Cleveland pilot suggests that that there are strategies that can shorten deconstruction time and increase safety for workers and neighbors alike.

Neighborhood Progress Inc.’s Frank Ford readily admits that the deconstruction versus demolition debate may not be one neighborhoods care a lot about. Understandably, neighbors of vacant buildings are most likely to favor the approach that eliminates the nearby blight as quickly as possible with minimal impact on adjacent properties. In many cases, they would be just as happy with a demolition as with deconstruction. “But,” insists Ford, “what happens in our landfills ought to concern us all. We ought to pay attention to what happens to these houses when they get knocked down. Fifty to 100 years ago no one worried about this, but more and more people are getting tuned in to these things now.”

In the coming years most areas of the country will see their economies and housing markets recover, increasing the value of vacant lots and properties and accelerating their reuse. But Cleveland has seen five decades of steady population decline, through bad times as well as good, from 914,808 residents in 1950 to an estimated 438,042 in 2007. The population is expected to shrink still further by 2016, to about 387,000³. There is growing acceptance in the public, business and philanthropic communities that Cleveland must take the steps necessary to adapt to a smaller footprint. This will require the city to purge vacant, abandoned homes from its inventory.

So for Cleveland, as well as for many other aging rust belt cities, the decision is not whether to demolish houses but how to do so in a way that is safe and cost-effective and minimizes the impact on the environment. If every one of the 11,500 vacant homes in the city’s inventory were to be demolished, the total cost would be roughly $115 million and hundreds of thousands of tons of construction debris would be sent to landfills. Diverting the reusable materials from the waste stream would reduce that amount significantly. While exact percentages vary house by house, about 50 percent of the deconstructed homes in Cleveland are sent to the landfill, though Bennink says in other cities 20 percent of a deconstructed house ends up as construction debris, 35–45 percent may be reused and 35–45 percent recycled.

The deconstruction industry is changing rapidly, with advances in tools and techniques that are making it faster, safer and more competitive with standard demolition. Bennink’s long-term goal is to make deconstruction a mainstream choice for building removal, with 51 percent of houses removed this way. Frank Ford is more focused on the short-term challenges of deconstructing 40 houses in a year. But, he notes, Neighborhood Progress, Inc. has recently begun work on a strategic plan. Although deconstruction was not even on Neighborhood Progress Inc.’s horizon in early 2008, it has found its way into the organization’s strategic thinking for the next 5 years.