Why Do 100-Year-Old Houses Have to be "Deconstructed" Instead of Demolished?

The new city law requiring "deconstruction" of houses, instead of demolition, limits the requirement to 100-year-old houses. Why the 100-year limit? Why not include 50-year-old houses or 25-year-old houses, or no age limit at all?

—My Old House

Deconstruction combines Portland's two favorite activities—(a) recycling and (b) tearing down houses to make room for apartments—into a single endeavor.

Instead of bulldozing condemned homes into piles of undifferentiated rubble, you basically part them out. Crews remove each board and fixture, setting them aside for later sale to the sort of house-mad yuppies who need a box of tissues to watch HGTV.

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Deconstruction has the same upsides as most other kinds of recycling—it's less resource-intensive to build with repurposed materials, and since 25 percent of what goes into landfills is construction debris, reusing it reduces waste. (Careful disassembly also makes asbestos- and lead-paint-related environmental snafus less likely.)

More sentimentally, deconstruction turns every house into an organ donor—the 1910 Craftsman you grew up in may be gone, but its beveled-glass transoms live on in a McMansion in West Linn! (You'll be arrested if you come near them, of course, but still, it's a nice thought.)

So why don't we mandate deconstruction for all houses? For starters, houses are like Americans: most of the ones created after World War II are kind of shitty and lame.

Houses built between 1917 and 1940, though, would be great candidates for deconstruction. Unfortunately, including them in the mandate would encompass two-thirds of all demolitions overnight.

"If we take too large a first bite, we set ourselves up to fail," says Shawn Wood of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "We'll revisit the date threshold in the future."

In the meantime, just thank me for doing a whole column on deconstruction without making any Jacques Derrida jokes—I bet the three literary-theory majors who got them would have thought they were a riot.

Willamette Week