What’s Old is New Again

wo things Detroit does not lack for are people in need of good jobs and abandoned homes that need to be taken down. Reclaim Detroit is helping to solve both of those issues.

Reclaim Detroit is a social enterprise of WARM Training Center, which trains unemployed people in weatherizing homes as well as other green jobs. As part of the Pathways Out of Poverty grant, WARM trained people in deconstructing houses; graduates of that program now run Reclaim Detroit, which deconstructs homes and reuses the materials.

Deconstruction is the process of disassembling a home that needs to be taken down, rather than demolishing it. Instead of simply bashing it apart with a wrecking ball and sending the scrap to a landfill, deconstruction contractors carefully remove every joist, structural timber, floorboard and more; anything than can be reused is.

It’s growing in popularity because it reuses materials and conserves resources. It also creates more jobs because a traditional demolition takes one to two crew members about a day while deconstruction takes six to 10 crew members up to two weeks, says Chris Rutherford, training program manager of WARM Training Center and Reclaim Detroit.

“We saw deconstruction as something we could pursue to create jobs and create an industry around this,” Rutherford says. “We didn’t want to train people for jobs that don’t exist – we just won’t do that.”

Reclaimed materials are used for everything from new homes to interior designs and furniture. The new Great Lakes Coffee Roasting Company in Midtown features lots of wood from Reclaim Detroit in its decor, from its floorboards to its bar top and tasting table.

Reclaim Detroit also does workshops for the community using reclaimed materials, such as making raised garden beds, birdhouses and toys.

Beyond the job and environmental benefits, there are intangible rewards to deconstruction as well. Rutherford relates a story of a house Reclaim Detroit deconstructed in Hamtramck. The crew found a diary in the attic floorboards of an African-American woman who had lived in the home in the 1960s, recounting what was happening in her life during that turbulent decade.

They tracked down the granddaughter of the woman, who, as it happens, had driven by the house shortly after it was taken down and was sad to see what had become of it. Reclaim Detroit gave her the diary and let her see the furniture that had been made from the home, allowing her to have a very personal remembrance of her late grandmother.