I recently attended the Great Lakes Re-Use conference in Buffalo, NY. This was a regional conference on developing and implementing building deconstruction and other creative solutions to address problems and solutions surrounding vacant and abandoned structures. The conference had three course tracks; Recycle the city, Restore the Center, and Act and Initiate. I attended the Recycle the City Track as it relates to my interest and efforts in the Near West Side Initiative.

On Sunday 11/16 I arrived in time to take the walking tour of downtown Buffalo to see the many different types of architecture and interesting buildings. One building we toured (as in the lobby areas) was the Statler Hotel, a Georgian Architecture style building with it’s heavy support structure.  We also saw the Buffalo City Hall which is an Art Deco building with murals depicting the city’s history. Our tour also took us past the old Buffalo Auditorium which is currently being renovated to be come a one of a kind Bass Pro shop. If they can pull this off; they plan to extend the newly discovered section of the old Erie canal, which now anchors a park and visitor center, into the building so that visitors might be able to arrive and dock their boats.

On Monday 11/17  I heard from several great speakers and networked with very knowledgeable folks with experience in deconstructing buildings and operating restores. The Welcome was done by Brian Sampson of Empire State Development Corporation and the Keynote speaker was Tyree Guyton, an Urban Environmentalist, of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit’s east side. He has created a living Indoor/Outdoor Art Gallery covering two city blocks using discarded objects he has found. He was assisted by Jenenne Whitfield the Executive Director of the Heidelberg Project.

During the morning I attended the Building Deconstruction Workshop with Michael Gainer of Buffalo and David Bennink of RE-USE Consulting.  Michael began his career deconstructing abandoned barns in Massachusetts to preserve the antique timber frame beams. He and David partnered to try to provide an alternative to demoishing 10,000 homes by the City of Buffalo. David has been a consultant for 15 1/2 years and performed deconstruction projects in 28 states. He is also an appraiser of properties for those looking into the tax advantages of gifting homes for deconstruction. Dave discussed Deconstruction 101 wich covered the background, costs, liabilities, opportunities and challenges of Deconstruction. One comment he made that sticks out was that “As the cost of tipping goes down; Demolition gains an advantage over Deconstruction. He also breifly covered a technique called “Hybrid Deconstruction” which he uses to deconstruct structures which increases staff productivity and safety as most of the operations are performed on the ground away from the roof and interior of the structure.

Michael Gainer, The Executive Director of Buffalo Re-use Inc., Presented on the establishment and growth of Buffalo RE-USE.

Some of the highlights from his talk were:

• There are approximately 23,000 vacant homes in the city of Buffalo.
• The city of Buffalo plans to demolish 1,00 structures a year for the next 10 years at a cost of $100 million.
• The highschool drop out rate is 54%
• Opened their Re-Store in November of 2007 one day a week and in May of 2008 opened five days a week(Tuesday thru Saturday).
• They are not able to Deconstruct city owned housing due to the “Prevailing Wage” provision which makes Deconstruction cost prohibitive.

During lunch there were comments from Linda Jacobs(Empire State Development Corporation) who acknowledged the efforts of various folks in the audience and introduced a presentation from the Building Materials Re-use Association.

On Tuesday 11/18 the Keynote speaker was Mayor Jay Williams of Youngstown, Ohio. He talked about the struggles the city has faced and the road they had to travel to develop a new urban plan which recognized that the city would never be as big as it once was and that there were opportunities to revitalize the city by creating urban forests as well as selective demolition and deconstruction to revive certain areas.

On Wednesday I attended a deconstruction workshop at the Grant Street Library. The workshop was lead by Dave Benink and hosted by Buffalo Re-Use(Great Job!!!). Dave went over his DECON 101 presentation again to set a framework then began to drill down into the process. He covered selling the materials produced from deconstruction, assessing buildings, scheduling Decon, scoping the work, partnering and other issues faced by Deconstructors.

During the afternoon we did an exercise where we went and actually assessed a property near the library. Here Michael is explaining the realities of assessing abandoned homes in the city.