A modest ecofrugal proposal

Here's another quick post, this time to tell you about a story in today's Washington Post: "Recycle homes to fix America's housing crisis." The author, Nancy Welsh (founder of an organization that rehabilitates abandoned houses) points out that there are 3 million American homes now in foreclosure, and there are millions of Americans who lack affordable housing. Some are struggling to pay the rent, some are bunking with family or friends, and some are literally on the street. So rather than tear down the homes in an effort to reduce supply and drive up property values, why not restore these homes as affordable housing for the millions who need it? This plan, Welsh notes, "would also save millions of pounds of construction debris from our nation’s already overburdened landfills," as well as "deferring" millions of tons of CO2 emissions that would be produced by building an equivalent number of units from scratch.

Since ecofrugality is all about avoiding waste, recycling entire houses seems like ecofrugal thinking on a truly massive scale.