A big thanks to all who came out last night to watch the show together and to support Buffalo ReUse, PUSH Buffalo, Re-Tree WNY and WNY Americorps

Photos here!

Only six FIVE days until Buffalo gets together to watch the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition TV show that made such a huge impact on our city last November. Details here.

We’re EXTREMELY proud of the part we played when we joined the huge volunteer team of contractors, suppliers, businesses and thousands of individual citizens. Our green demolition of the Powell’s old home helped David Homes achieve an Emerald Level LEED certification for the entire project (first ever in NY State!). Here are some of the things we were able to accomplish in our green demo:

• Did it in only 15 hours
• Achieved a 97% rate of diversion (by weight). This makes an EXTREME impact on what would usually go the landfill and be “thrown away”
• Preserved parts of the old house for use in the new house
• Made wood, interior furnishings, stone and other parts of the old house available for reuse in the new house, throughout the neighborhood and from our store
• Showed the world the economic viability of green demolition and the future of green jobs in Buffalo

Come to the premiere January 24! Get your free tickets at the Shea’s box office.

A big thanks to Shea’s Buffalo for being the venue, Join us, JANUARY 24th, 2010!
You were there when the Hero Family was announced, You were there when Buffalo ReUse performed the Green Demolition, You were there when volunteers from PUSH and Re-Tree WNY built the community gardens, You were there when Americorps and others descended on the block and over 70 houses in the neighborhood got a facelift, You were there when David Homes built the brand new house!…Now you can be there as all of Buffalo celebrates the national spotlight! On behalf of PUSH Buffalo, Buffalo ReUse, Re-Tree WNY, and WNY Americorps, as well as The Powell Family–we hope you will join us all.

Doors open at 7pm Folks can meet The Powell Family, mingle, and learn about the ways they can volunteer and contribute to future neighborhood improvements. Channel 7 (WKBW) will feature a documentary of behind-the-scenes footage of the 106 hours of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition while the cast, volunteers, and neighborhood worked around the clock. Finally, from 8-10pm ABC will broadcast the Special Buffalo Episode and we’ll all watch together as the story unfolds.

We hope that everyone will come and celebrate the national spotlight on Buffalo and the neighborhood revitalization igniting across The Queen City!

TICKETS:  Tickets will be available on Friday, January 15th. All tickets will be distributed in advance of the evening’s events.  Tickets to be obtained from Shea’s Box Office. Tickets are complimentary, limit of 2 per person. No tickets at the door, unless they are still available.

The Shea’s Box Office is located at 650 Main Street and is open  M-F 10 a – 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 am– 2 pm   Event Parking is available on Pearl Street, Washington St. etc.

**This event is on FACEBOOK. Please, invite all your friends!!

Our continued and generous supporters at the The Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo are creating a new website and they would like your input. The website will connect Western New Yorkers interested in environmental news and activities to the many environmental organizations doing great work in our region.  Sounds awesome to us!

Complete the survey (it takes just a couple minutes) by January 15, 2010, and you will be entered to win an iPod nano or $100! To be eligible to win a survey prize, you must live in Western New York. Click here to access the survey.

Green on, WNYers!

The Buffalo Edition of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” will be aired Sunday, January 24th at 8 pm on Channel 7. And what’s more…they’ve extended it to a 2-hour special!

A network publicist confirmed the air date for the episode, which will highlight the Massachusetts Avenue home that was rebuilt last month for Delores Powell, a Jamaican immigrant, and her four children.

According to the Buffalo News, “The extra hour is expected to highlight the rehabilitation of several West Side homes near the Powell home, as the community rallied to expand the original idea of the program.” GO BUFFALO!

Buffalo ReUse will be planning something special for our big debut, so stay tuned…

UB students from Stephanie Rothenberg’s class spent the semester creating design work for Sweet_ness 7, Buffalo Blue Bike and Buffalo ReUse. Their job was to communicate the mission and vision of each group and to create some collateral materials.

Come see what they came up with … and be seen. All are welcome!!
Encourage these young designers as they move forward, and support them in their journey of discovering how their skills and interests can help the community!

Their opening reception will be December 3rd, from 6-9 pm at the Grant Street Gallery. Refreshments provided by Tim Herzog of Flying Bison and whatever the students can dice and nuke in their dorms.

Friday morning, November 13, 2009 Buffalo ReUse will be begin Green Demolition and salvage of another west side property at 369 Normal Ave.  The house is already slated for demolition.  “It made sense to go ahead and continue with further improvements to the street since the rest of the block is getting a facelift.  The neighborhood is getting a real morale boost,” said Michael Gainer, Founder and Director of Programs, at Buffalo ReUse.  “All of Buffalo should be proud that there will be such a huge spotlight on the City, the grassroots efforts and the generosity that has resulted from this opportunity.

Materials harvested from the demolition, such as roof joists, rafters, wall studs, interior trim, bricks and foundation stone, will be sold to the general public at low cost from Buffalo ReUse’s ReSource retail store at 298 Northampton Street in Buffalo and used to fund ReUse’s job creation and community revitalization programs.

Eric Walker, Lead Organizer for People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), said “PUSH is taking a block by block approach, working in the community to stabilize this neighborhood. Jimmy Strach, who lives next door, has saved his Victorian home from the wrecking ball. When a guy makes a huge personal investment and saves a house from demo, we need to draw a line, take a stand and back him up on it. We also need to help community residents reclaim vacant spaces in ways that enhance and improve their quality of life. Green demolition of this house is a win-win for the neighborhood and for Buffalo.”

Buffalo ReUse sees green demolition as another way to reduce housing costs by using reclaimed lumber and other building materials from Buffalo’s large surplus of vacant houses, rather than crunch it up and throw it away at great expense.  By employing state-of-the-art green demolition techniques, Buffalo ReUse can harvest lumber efficiently and sell it to the public at costs averaging half of new material.

David Stapleton of David Homes and his team of builders welcomed the opportunity to build a new energy efficient house for the Powell family of 228 Massachusetts Ave on Buffalo’s West Side; however, there was one major obstacle in the way–the 2.5 story woodframe house the family had been living in for 4 years.  Buffalo ReUse got the call when the Project Manager was looking for a local contractor that could help them achieve an LEED Emerald Award for material reclamation, recycling and landfill diversion.  Buffalo ReUse is WNY’s first and only nonprofit Green Demolition and Salvage Crew.  They have been developing green demolition in Buffalo for over 2 years now.  Buffalo ReUse consulted with deconstruction guru, David Bennink.

David Bennink, of RE-USE Consulting, has been perfecting hybrid deconstruction for over 15 years and he has managed hundreds of green demolition projects across the country.  The biggest challenge of taking down the house was the time deadline.  “… but once I walked the building, I knew that Buffalo Reuse and I could pull off this project and my focus turned to doing it safely and finding the best way to represent the building deconstruction industry in this national spotlight.  It is likely that the building weighed about 80-100 tons not including the foundation or porch stone, or 150-175 tons with it, and of that we diverted an estimated 75% including a large volume of foundation stone hauled offsite for processing and reuse. ”

Buffalo ReUse’s rapid green demolition of the Powell’s old house was a demonstration of the practicality and economic feasibility of the technique–the house was deconstructed in under 17 hours! Our hope is that green demolition will soon be the mainstream method of demolition and the first choice for builders and municipalities in need of demolition.  Beyond reducing building costs, Buffalo’s “problem” of vacant houses can be turned into an opportunity to create jobs, train young people, fund community improvement programs and offer low-cost building materials to the public.

Volunteers from the public and Americorps WNY were directed on-site by ReUse staff and shown how to pull up flooring, prep wall panels and cut the joists in the attic so that the house could be taken apart efficiently and safely.  Hundreds of volunteers swarmed the house and salvaged interior finishes like window and door trim, baseboards, the stairwell and even piled 6 pallets of brick and 4 pallets of sandstone and limestone.  The Show chose select pieces from within the house to incorporate into its new furnishings and honor the history of the house and the family’s experiences.  Other house parts were carted off for use in adjacent houses and improvement projects in the neighborhood.
Buffalo ReUse DTech, Carrie Nader, commented, “It was great, if I needed a tool or something, I shouted for it and suddenly it appeared.  So many people were processing panels and loading trucks–all the material just disappeared.”  Amanda Alessandra operated the 10K telescopic forklift all night.  She has been a DTech Crew Leader for more than a year, “It was really a different experience to have an audience cheering for our progress as we separated each panel of the house and dropped it to the ground.”
Board Members of Buffalo ReUse were onhand to get dirty, perform safety checks, assist with cutting up the house, sorting materials, loading the trucks or spur the crowd to cheer on the Deconstruction Crew and Volunteers.
Everyone at Buffalo ReUse is proud to be a part of making a clear path of progress for the Powell family and all of Buffalo’s neighborhoods.

Well, we did our part for the ABC TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”. From Sunday at noon until the wee hours of Monday morning, we green-demo’ed a house in only fifteen hours. We had lots and lots of help from very able community volunteers, with service above and beyond by some of our own “super volunteers”.

If you would still like to help as the project of building the home and helping out in the neighborhood continues this week, please email volunteer {at} davidhomes(.)com. Everyone must register at the Water Authority on Porter Ave where they will be given a hardhat and a blue T-shirt. Americorps is the official clearing house for the volunteering and they will send out further updates on shifts and needs. Thanks!

“Wastelands” are areas that for multiple reasons have been left behind: They are areas formerly used for the extraction of earth resources, they are abandoned zones of industries, they are empty houses or vacant lots in deserted neighbourhoods, they are the spaces beneath and next to large infrastructural networks, they are empty parking lots after dark, and they are business districts outside business hours.

From the starting point of investigating the spatial, material and structural qualities of different types of wastelands in Buffalo, we aim to expand our understanding of those places and, consequently, to see the different possibilities for re-interpretation and re-inhabitation that the sites provide.

Our investigations take form as a number of short stories told through different medias, such as photo, map, collage, and video.

Opening reception: Grant Street Gallery on Tuesday November 3rd, 6.30 — 9.00 pm.

On view: Wednesday November 4th, 9 am – 9 pm.

Michael was interviewed by Great Lakes Urban Exchange, talking about green demolition/deconstruction.A good explanation of what we’re trying to do in Buffalo.