Brick by Brick

The Inquirer had a nice piece in this weekend's Real Estate section on recycling parts of old buildings for reuse on new buildings.  Known as "harvesting," the process not only makes for a great story for those who will own and/or use the new structure, but makes good economic sense, too – if the government can make it work for builders and developers.  After all, every brick that gets salvaged from an unused house and fit into a brand-new house is one less brick that needs to be made AND one less brick that needs to be landfilled.

Of course, blowing the thing up is much faster and therefore a much more attractive solution for a developer on a timetable.  So this only works if the salvaged material is worth the time to salvage.  Sometimes it is on purely financial terms – the resale value more than pays for the added cost of deconstruction versus demolition. 

But sometimes it only works when you factor in the environmental impact.  But the developer, no matter how good-hearted he or she is, isn't getting paid to save the world, just to get the next project done.  Enter the government.  In the case of the building being harvested in the Inquirer article, the numbers made sense once federal funds through an EPA project were factored in. 

I like government intervention in these cases: financially, the math doesn't work, even if the social gains make it worth it, so you juice the equation and let the actors do their thing.  (A long parenthetical note: this is why I'm in favor of a national gas tax.  Individual actors, be they car manufacturers or everyday drivers, lack the incentive to consume the appropriate amount of gas, given the negative "externalities" generated by driving, like pollution or congestion.  Ratchet up the price via a tax at the pump, and, like anyone who took frosh year Economics knows, supply curve slides up and equilibrium quantity consumed slides down.)  It may not seem like a lot, but brick by brick, maybe we can save the earth.