An alternative to demolition?

For a while now, I’ve been lamenting about existing houses that are demolished and trashed to make room for a new, much bigger one instead. 

This stuff isn’t really ecological and to me the good alternative would be remodeling or extending a home, if that’s what is needed, instead of throwing all these once precious construction material in the overflowing public landfill. 

There’s however an alternative to that and its call “deconstruction”. The process entails taking a house apart, piece by piece, down to the foundation. This assumes that the majority of what is removed from a house via deconstruction should be recycled or reused.

The house that stood on that picture and has been taken apart is located not far from where I live. These materials removed from the house can be donated to a qualified non-profit (501(c)3) charity and its market or estimated value can be claimed by the property owners on their taxes as a donation at fair market value. 

Demolition costs are much higher than when a house is simply trashed. In the case of the above example it took several months to “deconstruct” the home and must have led to a pricey bill. For instance, for someone in a 30% tax bracket could claim $200,000 worth of recyclable goods and get a $60,000 tax credit. 

That only requires that the owners tax bill is over that amount, so easy to see that this tax maneuver is not designed with the poor in mind. It’s also highly questionable the quantity of material that can truly be recycled. 

So in essence, the operation is mostly shouldered by the average taxpayer, which in light of what can be actually recycled ends up being not so efficient. Nice on paper and in principal, but not so fair to the less fortunate taxpayers!