Renovation Uses Twice As Much Labor, Half as Much Material as New Construction
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06. 2.08
Lister Block in Hamilton, owned by the Laborers International Union of North America
Here is another reason that renovating old buildings is greener than building new: It uses a lot fewer resources and employs a lot more neighbours. Donovan Rypkema points out that new construction is about 50-50 labour and materials, whereas restoration and renovation can be as much as 75% labour- for every dollar spent you get twice as much local employment, and use about half the resources. "This labor intensity affects a local economy on two levels. First, we buy an HVAC system from Ohio and lumber from Idaho, but we buy the services of the plumber, the electrician, and the carpenter from across the street. Further, once we hang the drywall, the drywall doesn’t spend any more money. But the plumber gets a hair cut on the way home, buys groceries, and joins the YMCA – each recirculating that paycheck within the community."
A good reason to fix buildings up, rather than letting them fall apart. More from ::Donovan Rypkema
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What a beautiful old building that is in the picture.
So what does this mean--labor is not a resource?
Labor of course includes a large (material) resource component, especially in the consumption-crazy west... labor is also taxed at a higher rate than material, about which I note two things:
1. The economizing buyer will opt for (less green) material consumption versus paying the (tax inflated) market rate for labor, encouraging new consumption,
and 2. sadly if you do choose to support labor, that's way more money for the government to waste doing things like carving free-for-all roads into the landscape everywhere and bombing foreign countries and jailing productive people for victimless non-crime, etc.
So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, really.
oh, but one good thing - labor is the easiest good to bartet with in a sufficiently dense community, which really makes it the best of all worlds.
it would be a good business, perhaps, to have a something like a core group of expert mentors who go around incubating and enabling barter communities, centered around restoration projects...?