Real Estate & Construction  October 26, 2007

Deconstruction project backers thinking green

FORT COLLINS – Want to know best how to put a new home together?

Start by taking a few apart.

That is the essence of the thinking behind a project that will clear three homes from the southeast Fort Collins landscape to make way for a new commercial development.

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Rather than knocking down 1970s-era houses with bulldozer blades, dumping the shredded wreckage into trucks and hauling it to the county landfill, organizers of the “deconstruct” project will turn the home sites into laboratories. There, students from high school and community college vocational programs and other volunteers will painstakingly disassemble each of the ranch-style homes, learning along the way the science and the art of home construction.

Developer Les Kaplan, whose Presidio Fort Collins mixed-use project will spread over about 95 acres where the homes are now located, donated the property to the Fort Collins-based National Center for Craftsmanship, a nonprofit group bent on the preservation and recovery of the vanishing arts of high-quality construction.

The project, with the backing of the city, two school districts, a university, a community college and other nonprofit housing-related groups, aims to overturn the widespread “scrape-and-dump” practice of preparing a construction site.

A better way

“As a developer, you say, ‘I’m going to scrape these three or five houses, and haul them to the landfill,’´ said Neil Kaufman, director of the craftsmanship center. “There’s a line drawn between the development process and the construction process. Shouldn’t we encourage the reuse and recycling of materials in the preconstruction process?”

The homes that will give way in the process that Kaufman and other project leaders will begin in March are along Lady Moon Drive, a street that Kaplan constructed last year that juts southward from Harmony Road, just across from the center of the Hewlett-Packard Co. campus.

Kaplan had spent about seven years acquiring the row of homes for a total of about $1.6 million. His encounter with Kaufman at a New Year’s Eve party last year led to a months-long brainstorm about how to approach the deconstruction project.

“He absolutely has a passion about this,” Kaplan said. “He truly is doing this because he believes in it.”

During the next several months, incentives aplenty will line up behind the project, some of them obvious and others more obscure.

“Les will likely get a substantial tax advantage by making the donation of this property,” Kaufman said.

On the other side, Kaufman and other project organizers will get at least $10,000 in rent payments that Kaplan will have collected from the month-to-month tenants who have lived in the homes Kaplan bought.

“That will enable them to bring on a few people part-time once the work begins,” Kaplan said.

Another benefit takes a somewhat less tangible form.

The LEED card

The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program will smile upon any project that encourages reuse and recycling of construction material. In fact, it’s likely Kaplan would be able to “bank” LEED points and apply them to Presidio projects yet to be built, Kaufman said.

LEED points are amassed to achieve certification at various levels – silver, gold and platinum, for example – that reflect energy conservation and green practices.

“One way to earn LEED points is to use recycled materials,” Kaufman said. “Another is by diverting material away from the landfills.”

An integral member of the project team is the Fort Collins chapter of Habitat for Humanity, one of the biggest and best-known affordable housing advocates.

“We did a series of classes this spring for Habitat, classroom-based activities,” Kaufman said. “We learned that it’s frustrating for Habitat volunteers that you have a couple of people on a project who have all the skills and are doing most of the work, and then 10 or 15 who don’t have the skills and are running errands.”

Having a working laboratory on Lady Moon Drive, with three homes serving as hands-on training grounds, volunteers will acquire skills that will greatly increase the efficiency of future Habitat projects, he said.

City gains, too

Fort Collins planning officials are also strong supporters of the deconstruction project, since it dovetails with the city’s work to develop what planning director Cameron Gloss calls a green-building “road map” for developers.

Three city departments – planning, natural resources and utilities – are collaborating on a package of 40 programs ranging from site selection to construction practices that will be included in the guide. Kaufman’s deconstruct project touches many of the bases, Gloss said.

“We’re very excited about the opportunity to work with Neil, and with Imago Enterprises (Kaplan’s development company),” Gloss said. “Neil’s interested in taking this deconstruction idea to the next level, to understand just how far we can go in reducing the amount of material that would go to a landfill.”

Since future construction projects in Fort Collins are more and more likely to require replacement of existing structures, the knowledge gained through the craftsmanship center’s project is essential, Gloss said.

Kaufman said he hopes the participating students and volunteers from throughout the region who will hone their skills in the project will form the core of a new class of crafts people who will invigorate an industry that has suffered from a loss of tradition.

“It’s all about materials and tools and hearts and hands,” Kaufman said. “We have a saying around here: You can’t e-mail the carpentry work. You can’t outsource the electrical work. These are things that have to be done by people who are right here.”

FORT COLLINS – Want to know best how to put a new home together?

Start by taking a few apart.

That is the essence of the thinking behind a project that will clear three homes from the southeast Fort Collins landscape to make way for a new commercial development.

Rather than knocking down 1970s-era houses with bulldozer blades, dumping the shredded wreckage into trucks and hauling it to the county landfill, organizers of the “deconstruct” project will turn the home sites into laboratories. There, students from high school and community college vocational programs and other volunteers will painstakingly disassemble each of the ranch-style…

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