 Welcome to strategies for climate action reuse and energy retrofitting and deconstruction. Thank you for joining us from wherever you are and whatever time of day it is for you. I'm Susan Holland, I'm the executive director for Historic Ithaca, and our organization is located in Ithaca in the beautiful Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. We're 56 years old, founded the year that the National Preservation Act of 1966 was signed into law. I'm joined by my colleagues today in preservation and sustainability, representing cities from across the country. I'm joined by Dr. Luis Aguirre Torres, Sean Wood, Stephanie Phillips, and Dr. Jenny Minner. We all work in climate action. I ask that you read their biographies later, or maybe you were prepared and you read them before, so we can use our time productively today. We will introduce each person as we move forward with the agenda. We all recognize that preservation is a sustainable discipline, and with federal, state, and local mandates in climate action, we must rise to the challenge. Preservationists have long held adaptive reuse and restoration are the tools in our preservation toolbox as the greenest building. The greenest building is the one already built. Additionally, and now we must retrofit existing buildings with energy efficient systems that go beyond the conversation about where to place solar panels on a historic building and to ultimately move to decarbonization. With the Inflation Reduction Act, or the IRA as it's been called, that passed in August of 2022 as the largest and most significant bill passed to address climate change in the US history. We will have more tools to support low carbon energy and measures to help Americans adapt to worsening climate conditions. The city of Ithaca is one of those cities internationally that's leading the way. From the cities of Portland and San Antonio, our panelists will share their groundbreaking solutions to demolition. Deconstruction ordinances, cultural conservation of our historic materials, and circular construction will be discussed. A fun fact from the Environmental Protection Agency is that construction and demolition debris are more than two times the amount of municipal waste in our landfills. We do talk about waste diversion a lot. Research and actionable items from Cornell University College of Art, Architecture and Planning via the Just Places Lab will also be discussed today. And they are founding members along with Historic Ithaca of Crowd, which is Circularity, Reuse and Zero Waste Development. And Historic Ithaca has been doing our part to keep architectural items and building parts out of landfill. In addition to the preservation efforts and advocacy that we do each day, we have an architectural salvage store, significant elements, which began more than 30 years ago. Workforce development is also part of our organization and increasing the potential for green new jobs included in local climate action plans. The panelists here are taking major strides in climate action. I'm excited for you to hear from our speakers. Our first speaker is Dr. Luis Aguirre Torres, the City of Ithaca's Director of Sustainability who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to his position to implement Ithaca's green new deal and to electrify Ithaca. Hello, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Luis Aguirre Torres. I am the Director of Sustainability for the City of Ithaca. It is a pleasure to be here. Not very often we were able to share the stage with conservationists, you know, those of us working on climate change, but you know, they are very much linked. If we think about climate change and we think about what we have been doing during the last several years, we made a lot of progress in Paris in 2015. That was the first time that every country came together and decided that we needed to do something to prevent temperatures from increasing beyond 1.5 degrees. And this was great, but it was very difficult because after that we needed to convince our countries, we need to convince every citizen of the world that this was necessary. Then the pandemic hit and it was impossible to hold a climate summit in 2021. But climate change didn't stop. As we can see with temperatures, you know, they continue to increase and we were at a high risk of really reaching that point of no return. We continue making progress and it was very interesting that in the middle of the pandemic, those that assess global risks decided that climate in action would be probably the number one risk that the world was facing at that point. Then we started seeing how every country started making pledges and trying to update what they promised to do in Paris. We saw that the United States was really far behind from the leaders, but, you know, things began to change. We had the conference of the parties in 2021. We have the climate summit at the end of the year where we decided that we were able to do this. You know, we could come together as a planet and the United States actually decided that despite of first having left the Paris Agreement, we were going to reunite with other countries in pledging to stop climate change. So the federal government started this process of developing the right legislation that eventually led to something quite unique. In the meantime, in the city of Itaca, we were working on a plan. We were working on a plan that we call the Itaca Green New Deal, where we were committing to fight climate change. During this time, the federal government continued negotiating and it was very interesting to see how disappointing it was first that we couldn't come up with a plan and then one day it surprises us all. One day everybody was on board and we had a plan. We had a plan to fight climate change and it was represented in the Inflation Reduction Act, which was a historic piece of legislation designed to help everybody fight climate change. The New York Times put together this diagram that basically shows how this is a very unique piece of legislation. It's $790 billion in savings. It basically designates $385 billion just for climate plus $100 billion for healthcare benefits. We also see in this graph from Bloomberg New Energy Finance how what the government has been doing actually combines the bipartisan infrastructure law with the Inflation Reduction Act would actually complement each other and will help us fight climate change. On one hand, we were working on infrastructure and on the other hand, we were working in incentivizing the demand so we could actually do this. And in this graph, which I'm not going to go into details, but enough is to say that we were on a path of having a temperature increase way beyond two degrees. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, even the Defense Production Act will accelerate the progress that we were making towards avoiding that. And it is very interesting to see how if we were to implement the Inflation Reduction Act to the maximum extent of its potential, we would be able to probably go back on track to reducing emissions the way we should, or at least the way we originally committed. The state of New York is doing a lot. The governor is dedicating a ton of money to make this happen and she has designated $25 billion for a green electrification fund. The governor of New York is very much fighting it out with the governor of California, trying to see which state is pledging the most and trying to make the most progress in the time that we have. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act basically sets the goals that we're going to achieve 100% zero emissions from electricity by 2040 and that we're going to reduce emissions by 2050 to at least 85% compared to 1990 levels. So the state of New York is actually doing a lot. So in the city of Ithaca, we decided that we needed to do our part. So in 2019, the city passed a resolution called the Ithaca Green New Deal where we were committing to full carbon neutrality community-wide by 2030, at the same time that we were going to be fighting to increase climate justice, to reduce economic inequality and social injustice in the city. This is not easy and what we need to do is we need to look at our economy and we need to look at our economy through a lens of climate change. We need to identify where in our economy are most of the emissions. We're able to do that. We're able to determine that a lot of our emissions were coming from buildings. We're coming from the way we heat space in buildings. We heat water the way we cook, the way we dry our clothes, but we're able to identify that buildings together with transportation were the number one source of emissions. And that means that was the problem that we needed to tackle. And we decided that we could do that through energy efficiency, the decarbonization of the electric grid and the electrification of everything that we could electrify. And we actually anticipate that if we were to devote our efforts to electrification, for example, we would reduce at least 30% of the emissions in the city. And just by implementing energy efficiency measures, we would also reduce 30% of the emissions. So we know now that we can actually do this even though it seemed impossible at the time. Then we started focusing on buildings because we believe that buildings are at the very core of this transformation. Buildings represent 40% of the emissions, but by tackling buildings, we could actually achieve about 55% of emissions reduction because through buildings we can install, for example, rooftop solar. And that would help us decarbonize the electric grid. We could have electric vehicle charging stations and that would incentivize people to acquire electric vehicles. So we believe that buildings can do a lot. And when we talk about buildings and a comprehensive green building policy in the city, we know that we have, as a local government, we have codes at our disposal as the best way of fighting, for example, fossil fuels in new buildings or in major renovations. We know that we could have a deconstruction ordinance to prevent a lot of the embodied carbon to go to the landfill. And we could also have building performance standards so we can mandate a reduction of emissions in existing buildings. We know that in buildings, you know, because of the way they operate and because what we do inside our buildings, because at the end of the day, the energy profile for every building, unless it's specialized for a particular industrial activity, we know what the energy profile is. And we understand where the carbon emissions are. We know that it has to do with what we use to hit our spaces, dry our clothes, cook our food. We know that it comes also from the amount of electricity that our appliances actually use, but we know that it's an opportunity to deploy solar panels charging stations. I think the trick is really in understanding where the embodied carbon is. You know, the embodied carbon that is used from manufacturing, transportation, and the installation of building materials. Embodied carbon is something that in the city of Ithaca, we are trying to tackle and we are still trying to figure out what the best mechanism is. Right now we're looking at ordinances, but we also need to work with the community. There are others that have studied this in detail and that understand like the people in Dorson Hinge that understand that building material reuse can be that overlooked solution for carbon reduction. You know, they talk about what happens with demolition waste. They talk about what percentage of embodied carbon can actually be rescued from interior materials and how much of that actually represents in the long term. We believe that deconstruction is perhaps key to what we need to do. We believe that perhaps if we were to tackle not only the operation of buildings, but also embodied carbon, we would be able to really achieve a maximum reduction of emissions in the city. Now, I would like to pass it on to my colleague, Sean Wood, who is construction waste specialist with the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. Thanks a lot, Luis. Like Luis mentioned, I'm Sean Wood with the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and I work as a construction waste specialist. And you may not realize it, but one of Portland's nicknames is Stumptown. So, 100 years ago, plus, we had these magnificent old growth Douglas fir trees throughout the region. And those trees were cut down in large part to build communities in the Pacific Northwest. So, Portland, Seattle, up to Vancouver, British Columbia, predominant building method was with these lumber from old growth trees. And if you look at that upper right picture, that's a two by four, I literally have it on my desk. And that's 100 years of growth rings over three and a half, four inches. So, that lumber has value and not a lot of our old growth forests are intact anymore. Those old growth forests are for all intents and purposes located in our buildings here in Portland. And when we talk about deconstruction, I think that, you know, we look at it as a novel approach. It's this new new and upcoming strategy to address the life cycle impacts of buildings. But in reality, for for centuries and decades, you know, we've been deconstructing buildings. So, this is a picture of a deconstructed Hill Military Academy from the 1940s. And it's really clear that folks are disassembling this building and stacking up the lumber for reuse. So, that was the 1940s. And, you know, by the 1960s, we're literally pulling out the wrecking ball. So, this is a picture of the journal building in Portland in 1969. And it is the image was taken at just the right moment when a wrecking ball is hitting that that tower there. Although I will point out there is a bathtub in the lower left-hand corner that someone has salvaged from something. And, you know, kind of the wrecking ball or the excavator, take your pick of how buildings come down. Prior to 2016, this is how houses came down in Portland. So, excavator heavy machinery comes in, smashes the house, drives over the debris to compact it as much as possible to efficiently get the material off the site and disposed of. And it's a lot of waste. And so we heard earlier that it's basically twice the amount of municipal solid waste. So, it's a huge chunk of our waste stream. And after 2016 in Portland, this is the predominant way that houses come down. So, this is deconstruction. The house is disassembled in the opposite order. It was constructed with a priority of salvaging materials for reuse. And so for us, that's predominantly the old growth lumber. And our efforts on deconstruction policy really kicked off in earnest around 2014. We were coming out of the Great Recession and we were seeing a really sharp increase in the number of demolition permit applications. So, you can kind of see here on this slide, you know, 2011, we started climbing out 2012, 2013, steep incline and the number of house demolitions in Portland. And that wasn't going unnoticed by our neighborhoods. So, they'd go to work, come home and the house next door to them was completely gone. And there were concerns about waste, hazardous materials, scale and character of the neighborhood changing. And we were directed, our bureau were directed by City Council to establish a deconstruction advisory group and come back to City Council with recommendations on how to advance deconstruction in Portland. And our advisory group was comprised of deconstruction contractors, salvage retailers, historic preservation advocates, city permitting staff, regional government staff, our county health person that was focused on lead paint, builders, neighborhood advocates, you name it, every stakeholder that we could get to come to our meetings did. And our proposal that we took to City Council was a phased approach. So, start with voluntary incentive based approach and then move into requirements that could be ramped up over time. And so, in 2015, we started with deconstruction grants. And then in 2016, October of 2016, so we're just coming up on our sixth anniversary. We launched the nation's first deconstruction ordinance. So, we set a year built threshold of 1916 or older or if it was designated as historic, regardless of age, it had to be fully deconstructed by a certified deconstruction contractor for the primary purpose of salvaging building materials for reuse. And then in 2020, we expanded the ordinance to capture all houses built in 1940 or earlier. And you'll see in that pie chart there are our initial ordinance 1916 threshold captured about a third of all house demolition permits and then advancing it to 1940 captures around two thirds. So, we've literally fundamentally changed how buildings come down or how houses come down in Portland with the result of this ordinance. And over the past six years, we've had about 550 whole house deconstruction. There's about 100 more in the pipeline that are in the permit process working their way towards being issued. And to date, we've salvaged about five and a half million pounds of lumber for reuse. And I emphasize reuse because it's not for recycling. The woods not chopped up for burning for energy recovery. This wood is salvaged along with other materials to actually get reused in other projects. And we average about 4,000 board feet of lumber per house. And we know the carbon benefits if you compare deconstruction to mechanical demolition and you look at it on a per house net basis. It's about 7.6 metric tons of CO2 equivalent is the benefit of every single house deconstruction compared to mechanical demolition. And to date, that's the equivalent of removing 900 cars from the road for a year. And quick tidbit of trivia takes the avoidance of 5.4 million plastic straws to equate to the carbon benefit of one deconstruction. So, plastic straws get a lot of press sometimes but takes avoiding a lot of them to equal the benefit of one deconstruction. There's also historic preservation benefits. I think that's a big point of this particular session is deconstruction is a tool for historic preservation. So, in the hierarchy of preserving buildings, adapting buildings, one of the next tools in the toolbox is if we can't preserve the building, we can at least preserve the building materials and the built history and the craftsmanship. In our case, the old growth lumber that comes from these houses. And there's also hazardous material benefits. So, deconstruction produces a lot less dust than mechanical demolition. It's considered a best practice in Oregon for addressing hazardous material concerns. In deconstruction, through the course of taking the house apart, deconstruction crews are, they come across unabated hazardous materials. So, asbestos under a cabinet that even though the house was surveyed and abated for asbestos, it's often hidden behind the walls on ductwork or under a cabinet, under a linoleum. Work stops the materials safely removed and then work continues. A mechanical demolition isn't going to have that benefit. The operator of the excavator is not going to see suspect material and stop the project and make sure that's safely removed. So, that exposes neighbors and folks at recovery facilities that are sorting through materials trying to pull out recyclables. Because deconstruction is a best practice when it comes to hazardous materials, in Portland, we've adopted new requirements for mechanical demolitions that start to better address the hazardous material concerns. So, that image on the lower right is actually what a house looks like today prior to mechanical demolition. So, all the lead-based paint, siding windows, doors, trim, anything non-structural has to be removed before mechanical demolition can occur and then they have to wet the building down. That added to the cost of mechanical demolition. Today, one of the economic outcomes of all of this is deconstruction is now compatible, comparable with the cost to mechanically demolish. Also added benefit of more jobs, not only through deconstruction but the fabrication of materials or installation of those materials into new projects or products and then the retail sales of that material. We went from two whole house deconstruction contractors in Portland to 17 are trained and certified to do the work today. We've had three new retail locations up, selling primarily the lumber but also other materials that are salvaged from the houses. And then as I mentioned before, the cost of deconstruction has come down as a result of innovation and competition and then the cost to mechanically demolish have gone up with extra scrutiny around lead and asbestos. And these are just a few examples of how the wood gets reused here in Portland. So everything from furniture and doors to tiny house pods art, it is hard to go into a bar or restaurant in Portland and not see this material showcased. It's part of our design aesthetic and part of our reuse ethos here in Portland. So that's it for me. I will pass it on to Stephanie Phillips, who is the program manager for deconstruction and the circular economy for the Office of Historic Preservation in the great city of San Antonio, Texas. So I will pass it on to you. Thank you. This is the story of two homes. They both provide their family shelter and places to make memories. But in time, some may think the lives of these homes are over. The first house gets demolished. Its lumber, windows, doors, bricks, all of it is buried in a landfill and will decay for hundreds of years. This is a waste of more than 41 tons of energy that was used to create the materials that went into the house. That's equivalent to driving your car nearly 93,000 miles or almost four times around the world in greenhouse gas emissions. Construction and demolition waste is the largest source of waste sent to landfills nationally. More than double the household trash we throw out. Wasting building materials by demolition leads to deforestation. It destroys ecosystems and decreases our air quality. In the past decade, the demolition of homes in San Antonio has created over 169,000 tons of waste. That's equivalent to over 100,000 hippos. But it doesn't have to be this way. Remember the other house? It's on the path for deconstruction, meaning its building materials will be taken apart and reused. Like an organ donor, this home's parts will give new life to other buildings. Its bricks and lumber were used as affordable alternatives to repair a home. Its windows were installed in a bakery. Its beautiful old-growth wood is now the flooring in a trendy new restaurant. And with a fresh coat of paint, its front door is now the top of a family's dining room table. It's estimated that reuse, refurbishment, and upcycling generate about 300 jobs for every 10,000 tons of material. Meaning that, on average, deconstruction employs six times more people than demolition. Deconstruction produces jobs in manufacturing, retail, and building trades, creating a cycle of reuse for building materials. We can't protect the future of our older homes and buildings by using materials from their past. This nurtures a healthy environment, continues the legacy of our city's built heritage, and keeps quality materials out of our landfills. San Antonio can lead the way for cities across the world. And it starts with our buildings today. Don't demolish, deconstruct, and reuse. It's the Earth-friendly alternative. That video gets me every time it's the squirrel for me. As Sean mentioned, hey everyone, my name is Stephanie Phillips. I am the Deconstruction and Circular Economy Program Manager at the City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation. That's a lot of words, but all of those are important. And I'm very, very excited to share with you San Antonio's program, which is probably the first, I think, in the country that is driven from a historic preservation perspective and actually led and administered by a historic preservation office. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how that came to be and why. And one of the first things that I want to focus on is a comment that was made in that animation, and it's this organ donor analogy. A structure may have reached the end of its life, but its parts and pieces could help extend the lives of dozens of other local structures. And this is an analogy that we started using really early on in our local discussions about deconstruction and what a policy like Portland's might look like for San Antonio. And we started those conversations way back in 2018. And this analogy has really kind of driven our communication strategy, our conversations with different stakeholders, and kind of focused us on why shifting from a demolition economy to a reuse economy broadly defined in the built environment is critical, not only for all of the other benefits that you've heard mentioned today, public health, workforce, reducing landfill waste, climate action, but also for the retention of cultural heritage and identity and all of the associated aspects that we as preservationists talk a lot about in our work. So in addition to all of that, we're really focused in our program about building local material banks to repair homes affordably. So one of the guiding doctrines in our work is the Secretary of the Interior Standards and one of the top things that you can do is use in-kind materials. But we also know that a solid wood window is not the same as a new wood window that's manufactured today. So really being able to walk the walk and make sure that we're capturing the materials that are already destined for the landfill because of course we're still trying to preserve buildings in place as much as possible, but the reality is that we cannot save everything. So it's really important for us as preservationists to be engaging these conversations and leading them in local policy administration, which is arguably the most powerful tool we have to preserve our structures locally. So taking that way back to how this conversation started in San Antonio, these are our demolition trends mapped in two different ways. On the right you see a line graph that shows how demolitions in San Antonio have been kind of growing not quite exponentially, but we're getting there. So in the past 10 years our demolition permits have increased almost 70%. So this is really important to think about when we're talking about why deconstruction is an important tool from a policy perspective. And then of course on the left is a heat map. And this map is really, really important because it shows the concentration of demolition activity. And what's really key here is that we've also included kind of the polygons of our local historic districts and our neighborhood conservation districts. And you see a lot of the demolition activity naturally occurring outside of those protected areas. But the reality is the building stock in those areas is the same. It just doesn't have that historic district or protective overlay, but those materials and buildings are equally deserving of perfection. So it's important for us to expand kind of our policy toolbox and make sure that we're ensuring that if buildings can't be protected there that we're recapturing the critical heritage of the building materials. So here are some key issues in San Antonio that again have been at the forefront of our conversation over the past four plus years. We commissioned Place Economics to do a study for us called Treasure in the Wall. Some of you may have seen it or read through it, but we really were interested in quantifying both the volume of materials that we're heading to our landfills and also the monetary value of that. So you heard some of those statistics in the animation, which is where we got it from. But something key that we've been driving home is that over the past decade 16 million dollars worth of salvageable materials have been sent to our landfills. And that's really, really important to mention when we're thinking about how the pandemic and other factors have increased the cost of virgin construction materials. So that gets into a cost and equity consideration about access to materials in general to build and repair homes. And then I also mentioned previously we're on pace. It says 500. We're probably tracking closer to 600 demolitions a year. And when we say that, we're including all types of buildings. So houses, commercial buildings, accessory structures like garages or carriage houses. And in San Antonio, the most common building type is that's demolished is older housing stock. So pre 1960 housing, which we know intuitively has a lot of quality materials like old growth lumber that Sean was mentioning previously. We want to be able to capture those materials and reuse them instead of just sending them to landfills. Demolition also disproportionately affects vulnerable communities. So we've touched on the public health aspects of demolition. Demolition is 100% air pollution. And here in San Antonio, I think we just got another email today that we have another ozone action day, which means the air quality is really bad. And we've had the most amount of 100 degree plus days in the city, I think ever this summer. And of course, when it's hotter, we're exacerbating the air quality issues and San Antonio specifically also has the highest asthma rate in Texas. So it's really important when we're talking about our work all the time to understand the public health implications that these decisions and our policy efforts make. And this is a really critical one when we talk about climate. And then finally, talking a little bit about the cost of construction materials. We've known from our studies and our work in San Antonio that there is an equity issue when it comes to both material access and material availability. So before we started pursuing a deconstruction policy initiative, the way that salvage materials was being exchanged in San Antonio was really between stakeholders that really understood that market. So demolition contractors selling to general contractors or reuse retail selling at a really high price kind of like the antique architectural market instead of something that should just be available widespread to everyone. So we really with our policy efforts wanted to make sure that we were increasing access to these materials by a diverse array of stakeholders. And of course, one of the key ways to do that is to recapture more materials that are heading to the landfill by switching from demolition to deconstruction. So those key issues have formulated into our program priorities and those are to promote the health, safety, welfare and public health of residents, support affordable housing, repair and production, increase our local pool of tradespeople and make renovation more cost competitive. We view deconstruction as a traditional trade that is part of the conversation. Same conversation as wood window repair or those contractors that are fixing up pre 1960 housing. So that's been really key as well. And then growing local industries and salvage upcycling and value added manufacturing value added meaning like creating furniture or a new product out of reclaim materials. So workforce is a key driver of this as well, which we'll touch on again in a little bit. And of course, I'm going to take you through a whirlwind of a few things that we did leading up to our actual policy initiative, which I'll touch on as well. We knew from the beginning, we did something similar to Portland where we put together a deconstruction advisory committee of local stakeholders that spanned the construction industry, real estate professionals, developers, demolition contractors, deconstruction contractors, but also stakeholders and all of the other areas that I've touched on already, public health, environment, historic preservation, workforce development. So making sure that all of these stakeholders are together in a room, which is important to have that dialogue and figuring out what a policy should look like specifically for San Antonio and what those program components are. And something that we knew that we needed to do with the guidance of that stakeholder group early on was train a local workforce and deconstruction. We can't reasonably expect our building property owners to perform deconstruction if they don't have access to contractors to do that work. So the pictures that you see on the screen are from the deconstruction contractor trainings that we held both in 2019 and 2020. And we held them in partnership with, one, the National Park Service and also our city's Parks and Recreation Department. And what I love, a little anecdote about the National Park Service property, which is the image that you see on the top left, that property had been surveyed, right? It was part of the national register. But even through traditional historic preservation documentation techniques like exterior documentation of the building, they didn't know that there was a basement in this structure. And some of you may be like, okay, a basement, who cares? But in San Antonio, basements are very rare. And what we uncovered while we were just deconstructing the building as part of the training was a bunch of bottles in the basement that were likely part of prohibition, like moonshine manufacturing. And we knew that from triangulating kind of other uses and other structures that were still standing in the vicinity. So we were able to uncover a story that had never been documented and would have been completely erased if the structure had just been rolled over by heavy machinery and picked up and thrown into a landfill. So there are absolutely cultural heritage dimensions to deconstruction because you're effectively peeling away the onion of a structure and so much of a building's history is not only within the modifications in the interior of the structure, which our profession doesn't always deal with, but also in the walls and the construction methods and the construction techniques. And one of our local contractors says it really well, you know, the best way that you can learn how to put a building together is to take one apart. So this is why training has now become a cornerstone of our Living Heritage Trades Academy and we'll be doing that in perpetuity. That is part of a workforce development training focused with preservation. So this is something we're really excited about. We also knew it was really important to do community engagement and I love using this example because what we've started to do with our events where we're able to have a booth at a fair or something like that is we're not just going to talk about all of the regulatory work that we do, right? Like it's important for us and our office to engage our community in creative ways and this example from 2019 is our favorite, I think. We were hosting a booth at what's an event called SolarFest, which is held by Build San Antonio Green, which is our local green building authority and they're on our deconstruction advisory committee, so they invited us to have a table at this event and it was right before Thanksgiving and we decided that our booth was going to focus on creating holiday ornaments out of reclaimed wood and other materials. So that's the activities that you see here, the really cute child holding up her ornament that she decorated, but in addition to that, you see that really cute turkey on the screen. Her name is Sally. Our office actually made her out of fully reclaimed materials including lumber and her eyes are little drawer pulls and her beak is like a little door hinge. So we somehow convinced the mayor's office to pardon her from the landfill in front of actual human beings. He even signed a proclamation that we created, which was a little fake publicity stunt, but it was also really important because it solidified our contributions to climate action, advancing our climate plan, our affordable housing plan. So we've done events like this since then and we'll continue to do that in the future. We're even working on a large scale salvage fair. We'll have vendors that are all focused on reclaimed materials and making things out of reclaimed products. So this is something that we're really committed to is kind of engaging a bunch of different audiences as much as we can and emphasizing why material reuse is really critical from a creative perspective as well. So I'm really, really excited to say that as of September 8th, we adopted a deconstruction ordinance. We became the largest city in the country to do so and our ordinance took effect just last week and we're still celebrating. I'm so excited. So our ordinance includes three phases and the first phase that took effect this weekend is applicable to city-ordered demolitions only so that's if the city is issuing a demolition order, the deconstruction ordinance kicks in and that applies to residential structures defined as fourplex or smaller built in 1920 or earlier regardless of where it's located or 1945 and earlier if it's in a historic district or a neighborhood conservation district, it has to be deconstructed and in January 1 of 2023, our second phase is going to kick in and it's the same parameters that I just mentioned but if it doesn't matter who's requesting the demolition, it can be a private property owner. They will have to deconstruct the building using a certified contractor that we train and then we're very happy that an automatic phase was included, the third phase. So starting January 1 of 2025, our ordinance will expand automatically and it will expand to include residential defined as eightplex or smaller built in 1945 anywhere in the city or 1960 and earlier in our historic districts and neighborhood conservation districts. So we're very, very excited to finally be shifting to kind of a policy administration phase where we're going to ensure that buildings are being deconstructed and we're tracking kind of the impact in a similar manner to how Sean has been able to gather the environmental and material recovery impact that Portland has. So, endless thanks to Sean for being our North Star in guiding us because he was the leader. So thank you, Sean. And in addition to the actual policy, something that was really critical for us is we have all of these other program components that are also essential to making sure that the policy works. We definitely didn't want to just pass an ordinance without kind of these supporting elements that were really unique to San Antonio and one of those was a question that was asked very, very early on at the beginning of our Deconstruction Advisory Committee meetings, which is where is all this material going to go? If we're going to be deconstructing 50 to 100 more full buildings a year, that is 50 to 100 buildings more of material that we're going to have to recover and San Antonio doesn't have like a huge robust infrastructure of salvage stores quite yet. We anticipate more will pop up, but we knew the city needed a player role in kind of functioning as the last stop before the landfill. So we partnered with Port San Antonio, which is a decommissioned Air Force base, San Antonio's military city USA. So they had this amazing collection of almost 25 structures from 1920-ish era that used to house the generals that were stationed at that military base. And it's on the National Register and we actually learned that most of the housing was constructed from reclaimed lumber that shipped airplane parts to Kelly Field. So it's a full circle moment, but we are using this site kind of for three different things that all work together. The Material Innovation Center will receive donated building materials if someone really doesn't know what to do with them after deconstruction. It's also one of the headquarters of our living heritage trades academy. And then finally, we are working on developing a San Antonio tool library, a tool lending library where people can rent tools for their projects. So I like to refer to this campus as kind of a micro circular economy where if you need tools to train people to do work and use the materials that are donated to the center, that's happening in that run place. And we are prioritizing the donated materials for use in affordable housing projects. So ones that are led by the city or by private developers that are administering a recently passed city bond that focuses on affordable housing, really making that connection that these reclaimed materials can be used for the organ donor analogy or even to build new buildings. And here are examples of those in action. So on the left is our really popular Rehab Arama program where we restore multiple houses in one day using the help of contractors and students and volunteers. So we envision that the materials donated to the center can be redirected to these projects so that we're not relying on patching old siding with cheap home depot lumber, for example. We're able to use siding that came out of a building that was deconstructed from the same construction era and really making sure that that repair is long lasting and enduring for the people in these homes, which is really critical. And then on the right, we're really, really excited about this. We have a growing partnership with UT San Antonio and their architecture program. And what you see here is a wall section built completely out of reclaimed lumber. All of that is reclaimed. One thing that we run into, which you may run into in your own communities, is there's this barrier in people's minds that you cannot use reclaimed lumber to build something structural. And I think as preservationists, the traditional wisdom is... but that wood is way better than the wood you can buy today, right? So we're working with them to figure out how we can use reclaimed lumber not only for finished purposes, but for structural purposes and build small-scale housing out of it to, again, meet our city's affordable housing goals. So we envision, of course, so much growing out of this program from salvage to ADU, what I just mentioned, you know, training people to build small-scale housing out of reclaimed materials and make sure that we're coordinating with organizations and building relationships with affordable housing organizations. Material innovation as well. If we are very interested in using reclaimed material, especially some of the stuff that may not be super easy to reuse, like kind of short boards of reclaimed lumber to create new materials out of it. I know in Portland, they've already started doing that with Oregon State University, you know, figuring out how to create cross-laminated timber out of reclaimed lumber instead of virgin lumber. Like, yes, that's great. We should do that. So serving as a think tank and kind of an innovation space for that. We also envision this as part of a comprehensive disaster resiliency strategy. So we want to make sure that as the climate, you know, all of these climatic events increase that if there is damage to historic structures and we can rapidly deploy compatible materials to repair those buildings quickly, that this space can serve as a hub for that as well. And then we definitely always say that we have been laying the foundation for the circular economy in San Antonio starting with building materials and that this kind of model can certainly expand to other products like textiles, electronics and more. We want to be the municipal leader in Texas and the country in circular economy. So I want to just give a little shout out to one of our city council members. This is a newsletter that she issued after the deconstruction ordinance passed. We did not ask her to do this, but I want to highlight how there's always kind of intersectional results to any policy that you're developing. And it was, you may have been able to tell from how I've been describing this that it has been essential for us to connect deconstruction to larger city policy goals. So she mentioned how, you know, looking at this from a holistic perspective, deconstruction is as much about protecting residents' health as it is preserving our historic structures and materials, and that is so critical. From this effort, you know, we have linked historic preservation and building reuse and building material reuse to affordable housing, to public health, to climate action, to workforce development, and our city leaders and partners recognize that. So yes, preserving buildings is really critical, but it's not just about that anymore. It's about how it fits into all of these larger, critical, urgent conversations, and this has been such an amazing way to do that and to show that preservation really can lead in this space. And this is taking us full circle. This is where I'm ending. This mind map that you see on the right kind of shows the six umbrella areas where we knew this policy would hit on in San Antonio, and this is actually something that our advisory committee created way back in 2018. We were having kind of these conversations, and one of our brilliant advisory members was like, it'd be really great to have some sort of simple graphic that showed how deconstruction affects all of these different industries in San Antonio. And this hasn't changed, right? So this is just evidence that, you know, our efforts started, and can start in your own communities with mapping these connections to having conversations with these industries, to forming partnerships with these industries, and then to advancing the visions and goals that I've mentioned in prior slides. And it also can lead to funding. You know, we've created innovative cost sharing agreements between different departments. Our relationship with our solid waste department, our office of innovation, our IT department, our neighborhood and housing services department, our office of sustainability has been strengthened so much by this effort. So it's really something that I see as something that the preservation field should lead on in every single community for all of these benefits and more, and then it's just only going to get us closer to more intersectional, equitable policy in our cities. So with that, I will say thank you very, very much. If you're interested in seeing more of our work, our program website is sarews.com, and with that, I will kick it over to Dr. Jennifer Minner from Cornell University to talk about the amazing work at what is happening in Ithaca and across New York State. Great, thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here following these incredible success stories in preservation, deconstruction, and climate action. I'm Jennifer Minner. I'm an associate professor here at Cornell University in the Department of City and Regional Planning, and I direct the Just Places Lab. I'm a proud preservation educator and a partner in the Crowd Network. So Crowd stands for Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development. We began in 2020 as a network to work toward a more sustainable built environment around New York State. We're comprised of preservationists, planners, architects, policymakers, salvage and reuse professionals, university labs like my lab and the circular construction lab at Cornell and more. And it's really a movement in support of building and building material reuse through preservation, salvage, and deconstruction to realize all of the important environmental, social, and economic benefits that you've heard about from Portland and San Antonio. So many of our efforts were spurred and connect to Ithaca's Grain New Deal, which was a resolution adopted in 2019 to achieve carbon neutrality community-wide by 2030 and to ensure those benefits are shared among all local communities to reduce historical, social, and economic inequities. And building energy retrofits and electrification are really in motion in Ithaca. I think we really punch above our weight in terms of sustainability initiatives in that regard. And Crowd is really bringing forward this idea of building and building material reuse as offering other important means of decarbonization and achieving all of the important aims that have been discussed by prior presenters. So Crowd began in 2020 in the context of large-scale demolition activities, particularly in College Town, which is right at the step of Cornell University. And our partners, Historic Ithaca, had been advocating for the preservation of the Chacona Block, an important historic resource. Unfortunately, that designation didn't go forward and we were faced with a large-scale demolition, significant elements, which is Historic Ithaca's salvage and reuse wing went in to salvage materials. I and my colleague Gretchen Worth followed along. I, as a researcher, to really try to understand the salvage process. And we learned that there's a lot that should be done to put better infrastructure in place so that we can save these important materials and resources. Another example early on in Crowd's sort of pandemic-era history was with the Wall Street African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Wall Street in Auburn, New York. And when this video plays, you can see just an astounding interior with beautiful beams, curving pews, just an amazing material. And our colleague, Andrew Robley, who is the Director of Preservation Association of Central New York, really did his best to try to preserve that building. Unfortunately, it was beyond what could be preserved at that point. And we looked at opportunities for deconstruction and salvage. The Circular Construction Lab, who I mentioned before, really studied the building structure itself to understand what could be salvaged, how it might be deconstructed. And we found this amazing potential receiving site. So if you can imagine how profound it would be to really take the materials from an AME Zion Church, really important to the history of Auburn, and important AME Zion Church is really important to black culture and history and to take these materials and for them to flow to an incredible program called Quarter Acre for the People, here closer to Ithaca, which was really enthusiastic for using these materials. And Quarter Acre for the People is a program that provides access to local farmlands, for local families, especially of African and or indigenous ancestry, as well as refugee families who have historically been displaced. So this was really an amazing vision. And I really wish that it was a success story all that it's really done here is demonstrated how sad it is that we haven't yet in this community found a way to really support the level of deconstruction and salvage that really could help preserve these important materials and memories and cultural knowledge. So as you've heard in other presentations as well, in the U.S. alone, construction and demolition debris amounts to roughly 600 million tons, much more than municipal solid waste and electronic waste. And so sad to see these important historic resources go to the landfill and become part of that statistic. So here I'm going to show a brief video that highlights two other important partners, including Finger Lakes Reuse. And you can hear the voice of Diane Cohen and Felix Heisel with the Circular Construction Lab. The build environment is one of the key players in climate change. Buildings are responsible for 40% of carbon emissions globally. And so we have to change. This is not a question. The question is how do we change and how quickly can we change? That really is the question. I'm really into trees and to save this beautiful 100-year-old oak, this chestnut, 8-inch-wide chestnut boards that are 12 feet long with gorgeous grain. I mean, it's something you can't even get anymore. Beautiful fur, the structural lumber that was in these houses is, you know, I think invaluable in a sense. If we tear down a building and one or two days just putting it all in a dumpster and carrying it to the landfill, that is cheaper in terms of how many labor hours you put in and what kind of equipment you need. But we carry societal costs that result in climate change at the end. So that's a short clip from a longer video. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, really showing the dramatic pilot projects to engage in the deconstruction of one structure and then several other buildings were salvaged in a really beautiful community-unbuilding project led by Finger Lakes Reuse. And this really demonstrates how preservation and deconstruction can contribute to creating a circular economy, so moving away from a linear economy that is take, make, and throw away to one in which we retain the materials from these buildings, enhance the lifespan of buildings, and then reuse components in a repeated process that is more sustainable. So conserving building materials saves embodied carbon and preservation is a means of extending the lifespan of whole buildings. It's a really important way of accomplishing that. But when preservation is not possible, deconstruction and building material reuse is much better than demolition. And here in these images, you see a range of preserving in place to the potential to move buildings to preservation that embraces infill and overbuild to retaining elements in situ, salvage, and deconstruction. So it's a whole sort of continuum of circularity here. So Crowd's Work has been to support a growing movement within the Finger Lakes Reuse, or I'm sorry, within the Finger Lakes Region and within New York State as a whole. We've engaged in research and resource development in education and engaging community members in developing recommended policies and practices and really working towards green jobs and skills creation through deconstruction, reuse, and circular economy. The Susan Kristofferson Center for Community Planning has been producing resources for local governments and a New York State Deconstruction Resource Guide really important materials of public outreach to inform members of the public and policymakers of the potential for deconstruction. In addition, we recently held an exhibition here in the center of Ithaca called Deconstructing Demolition that includes interpretive displays and illustrating the value both in terms of the carbon that is saved and the economic value of components. This included an augmented reality gallery and public engagement, and that public engagement also included building code staff who, building code officials who were very excited to be a part of this. And on the left you can see Wyeth Augustine Marcele who is one of the students from the Just Places Lab who is presenting on precedents including the important precedents in Portland, Oregon and San Antonio among other local governments who are adopting both regulations and incentives to support deconstruction. We've also been engaging in studies of demolition activities and permitting processes here in Ithaca and in other communities. That includes work in my Just Places Lab and producing recommendations to the city of Ithaca to really realize circular economy and the benefits of deconstruction here locally. So instead of sad endings, we really hope to be creating preservation alliances that can work toward new, sustainable beginnings and climate action. So thank you and here's a website and more information about Crowd. Thank you so much. I'd like to thank our panelists. Louise, Sean, Stephanie and Jenny and all of you for participating in the discussion today. Our panelists are exemplary models for all of us to follow as we move through the 21st century and to impact the very serious and pressing issue of climate change. I do think it's worth repeating that deconstruction is one tool in the toolbox for preservation but it's a worthy endeavor to save the parts that built your community. If they're gone from your community, they're gone forever. Examples all of our examples today regarding existing buildings, energy retrofitting, deconstruction and all parts of climate action, they'll all be acted upon differently for different jurisdictions. It is not a one size fits all. What works in San Antonio today might not work in Ithaca tomorrow and yes, we're about to test that theory out in 2022. So stay tuned. We all have different building stock, land uses, size of population, vacancy rates, land values and the list goes on. From all these speakers, I think you can see that one group of preservationists probably can't make it work. Cannot make this work but collaboration is the key with whomever you believe should be at the table. From my experience, I was the director at Historic Albany for 12 years and I spent a lot of time chasing emergency demolitions and my thought was that there has to be a better way. So when I arrived in Ithaca, to be the director at Historic Ithaca and from this particular locality, there were many parts that moved together to start Crowd to collaborate with Dr. Minner at the Just Places Lab and Louise for Electrify Ithaca. And our partners across the country were also part of those collaborations. We spent quite some time talking to Stephanie and Sean and others about deconstruction and things that they were doing there. And I know there's a dark cloud of the pandemic but the silver lining was the miracle of Zoom for education, sharing, listening, watching others and collaborative action. And we know that perseverance is key because preservationists are really good at that. Lastly, I just wanted to mention that legal concerns will be prevalent in any actions that you undertake and programs you might envision. It's good to get advice early and involve municipal officials and legal personnel somewhere near the beginning of your process. In the end, for all of those actions, actually. And the end slides that we have here, our panelist contact information is listed and also some websites that you can access. These are the websites and their contact information is here. And please feel free to contact us about your projects. Thank you for listening and allowing us to share experiences for a better collective future with strategies for climate action, reuse, energy, retrofitting and deconstruction. Be well.