House Huggers Unite!

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Not all of us are house huggers–people who would chain ourselves to a porch to stop a wrecking ball in its tracks. But awareness is growing about the dangers–and costs–of tearing down decent, existing structures to replace them with something new.

For decades now, America’s knee-jerk reaction to the problem of outdated housing and blight has been to bring it down. The remarks of a New Jersey builder typify the prevailing paradigm. When asked to defend the fact that the house he was razing was more solidly built than the one replacing it, he said, “That’s okay because I expect to tear this one down in twenty years.”

The EPA estimates that some 250,000 houses are torn down annually; these consist of functional but outdated houses in high-dollar neighborhoods, blighted and boarded-up inner city housing, and houses that stand in the way of government projects and private development.

The dangers
On average, a 2,000 square foot house will contribute 32,000 pounds of debris to the landfill, and off-gassing from these landfills contributes mightily to greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental woes. What’s more, experts tell us, each teardown deals a blow to the community as a whole. “The best analogy is teeth,” says Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (Ballantine Books, 2004). “It’s clear to us you’re not supposed to pull out teeth. Dentists try to preserve every single tooth they can.” When you bring down a house–even a vacant or boarded-up house–you make the houses on either side of the teardown vulnerable. “Instead of its removal aiding a healthy block process, teardown actually sets up the contagious process of destruction.”

Since 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has offered significant resources to householders, community activists, preservationists and other stakeholders to fight the trend. “As older homes are demolished and replaced with dramatically larger, out-of-scale new structures, the historic character of the existing neighborhood is changed forever,” the National Trust’s Teardowns and McMansions website page states.
While the economic crisis has brought about a “slowdown of teardowns” in markets around the country, according to Adrian Scott Fine, director of State and Local Policy for the National Trust, “in other markets such as Dallas or Austin, we’re still seeing them happen, maybe not at the same pace as two or three years ago.”

Denver Model: Context-sensitive, form-based zoning 
In Denver, for instance, teardowns dropped from a high of around 800 homes per year in 2007 to a projected 250 teardowns in 2010, according to Jim Lindberg, director of Preservation Initiatives in the Mountains-Plains office of the National Trust in Denver. “One of the problems underlying the teardown phenomenon is out-of-date, bad zoning,” he says. “The solution is better zoning.” In June, Denver passed a “context-sensitive, form-based zoning code,” which starts with an analysis of existing patterns, taking into account where buildings are sited on lots, examining setbacks, the proposed building’s scale and the way a finished property will look in the public realm. Miami has passed a similar measure, and forward-thinking municipal planners are taking advantage of this slow building period to revise codes in advance of an anticipated recovery. 

Innovative solutions
The North Carolina-based national non-profit Builders of Hope, with offices in Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, New Orleans and Dallas, has pioneered a method of rescuing teardown houses, physically relocating them (or rehabbing them in place) and using them as the basis for affordable, green housing. Its debut community in Raleigh was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as perhaps “the most politically correct housing development on the planet.” Likewise, others are moving into rehab for the first time. Earlier this year, Habitat for Humanity International launched its Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative and now has more than 150 affiliates on board. Supporters of house rescue and rehab should encourage these efforts.

If you fear that an unnecessary teardown is about to occur in your community, take a trip to the library. Following are some resources to help you gather the facts and mount an opposition: 

• Browse The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s website for several eye-opening, free PDFs, including:
• Advocacy for Alternatives to Teardowns, a hands-on guide ranging over issues from alternatives to teardown to mounting a successful campaign to strategies for managing teardowns, and
• What's Wrong with Teardowns: A Visual Analysis, in which graphic illustrations help make the case for how teardowns are impacting older neighborhoods.
• Too Big, Boring, or Ugly: Planning and Design Tools to Combat Monotony, the Too-Big House, and Teardowns, a presentation by the American Planning Association.
• Form-Based Codes, an alternative to conventional zoning, in which physical form rather than separation of uses is the organizing principle. 

North Carolina-based sustainability advocate Wanda Urbanska is the author of eight books, the latest of which is The Heart of Simple Living: 7 Paths to a Better Life (Krause, 2010). She is at work on a book about Builders of Hope.