Serious recycling
Apr. 23rd, 2009 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumBy way of robertainnc I saw an article about a woman who is working on affordable housing, and community building, by, building hope
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.>
And it worked. From 2006 (when she started), to the present, the organisation she built has moved 24 houses, fixed them up and sold them for about $100 sq. foot. They did it all on one cul de sac.
Watching from her front porch while two of her children play in the yard, Dawanna Stanley says believe it. Her house, one of the biggest on the street at 2,700 square feet, had been gutted to the bare walls and floors when she and her husband first saw it. But they also could foresee what it has become: a gracious, five-bedroom home big enough for their blended family of five children. The price: $185,000.
Dawanna and Harry looked in vain for years, first in Maryland and then here, for a house that was large enough, in a safe neighborhood and affordable on their two salaries as sales assistants for Verizon and AT&T, respectively. They'd almost given up when they found this place.
"We love this block," she says. "It's so quiet. The only trouble here is a stray dog."
Not only are there 24 people/families with affordable houses, there is all that waste (lumber, drywall; whatever was salvageable from the old place) which didn't get tossed away, to be dumped somewhere.
It doesn't stop there.
Builders of Hope, [Reginald] Parker is eager to explain, doesn't just save houses from landfills and money for its buyers. It also saves lives.
At 38, Parker has spent much of his adult life in prison, including a four-year term for running drugs and guns. He was released 17 months ago and now sees his own hopes building. "Builders of Hope is changing people's lives around like we're changing these houses around," he says effusively, "renewing, renewing us—you know what I mean? Renewing our hearts."
To these men, Builders of Hope has become, as Deal and Bynum explain, not only Murray's mission, but theirs as well. "Nancy doesn't ever come and say, 'Look what I've done,'" Deal says. "She goes, 'Look what you guys have done,' because if it had not been for us—this is what she tells us—then Builders of Hope would not be what it is today."
It's a win/win. The cost of demolition is saved for those who donate their homes (one developer donated several from the site of a project. They were in pretty good condition. Maybe he passed the savings on in the pricing for the new homes. In any case, he'll probably be willing to do the same the next time he's doing that sort of deal).
Some take more work.
[Mike] Dasher is standing in a building that arrived in rough shape. He thinks it was once a barn, but now it's a solid, 680-square-foot home. It needed to be gutted, but the exterior framing and central bearing wall were preserved, and the heart pine floor was restored.
Think of it as a diamond in the rough.
Builders of Hope
robertainnc I saw an article about a woman who is working on affordable housing, and community building, by, building hopeIt 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.>
And it worked. From 2006 (when she started), to the present, the organisation she built has moved 24 houses, fixed them up and sold them for about $100 sq. foot. They did it all on one cul de sac.
Watching from her front porch while two of her children play in the yard, Dawanna Stanley says believe it. Her house, one of the biggest on the street at 2,700 square feet, had been gutted to the bare walls and floors when she and her husband first saw it. But they also could foresee what it has become: a gracious, five-bedroom home big enough for their blended family of five children. The price: $185,000.
Dawanna and Harry looked in vain for years, first in Maryland and then here, for a house that was large enough, in a safe neighborhood and affordable on their two salaries as sales assistants for Verizon and AT&T, respectively. They'd almost given up when they found this place.
"We love this block," she says. "It's so quiet. The only trouble here is a stray dog."
Not only are there 24 people/families with affordable houses, there is all that waste (lumber, drywall; whatever was salvageable from the old place) which didn't get tossed away, to be dumped somewhere.
It doesn't stop there.
Builders of Hope, [Reginald] Parker is eager to explain, doesn't just save houses from landfills and money for its buyers. It also saves lives.
At 38, Parker has spent much of his adult life in prison, including a four-year term for running drugs and guns. He was released 17 months ago and now sees his own hopes building. "Builders of Hope is changing people's lives around like we're changing these houses around," he says effusively, "renewing, renewing us—you know what I mean? Renewing our hearts."
To these men, Builders of Hope has become, as Deal and Bynum explain, not only Murray's mission, but theirs as well. "Nancy doesn't ever come and say, 'Look what I've done,'" Deal says. "She goes, 'Look what you guys have done,' because if it had not been for us—this is what she tells us—then Builders of Hope would not be what it is today."
It's a win/win. The cost of demolition is saved for those who donate their homes (one developer donated several from the site of a project. They were in pretty good condition. Maybe he passed the savings on in the pricing for the new homes. In any case, he'll probably be willing to do the same the next time he's doing that sort of deal).
Some take more work.
[Mike] Dasher is standing in a building that arrived in rough shape. He thinks it was once a barn, but now it's a solid, 680-square-foot home. It needed to be gutted, but the exterior framing and central bearing wall were preserved, and the heart pine floor was restored.
Think of it as a diamond in the rough.
Builders of Hope
