We should be re-inventing buildings

The north end of the old Horton school started coming down last week. It was as inevitable as the demolition of its counterpart in Canning, Cornwallis District. They were built cheaply and not maintained well because school boards couldn't afford to. Shame, shame. I wonder if the much older Kings County Academy has a similar fate?

Geraline Blyleven, the Green Renovation Support co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, has pointed out that if the centre's current 1870s saltbox building had been torn down, it would have wasted enough fossil fuel to send a small truck four times around the globe. That embodied energy, as it is termed, refers to the energy used to produce and transport building materials and the energy used to construct a building. This energy is lost when a structure is demolished.

According to Blyleven, the majority of modern buildings are demolished before they are 30 years old, not because of structural failure, but because the area is being redeveloped, the building was not well maintained or it is no longer suitable for its intended use -- showing a lack of effective planning and a lack of imagination.

The Halifax Regional Municipality is currently developing a regional plan that emphasizes the principle of adaptive re-use. Refurbishing buildings for new uses could save an amazing 25 to 30 per cent of the solid waste stream.

Blyleven says there are models in Nova Scotia to steer us from the disposable mindset toward more sustainable building. The still under construction biology building at Acadia University is one good illustration. We should adopt standards such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) to measure how “green” a building is, and focus on reducing the impact of the building on the environment. This program considers factors such as materials and resources, including re-use and construction waste diversion.

We should build to last a millennium and plan on re-inventing the building stock already around us. They've been doing that in Europe for centuries.

Lately, a senior citizen told me he couldn’t afford to sell his big, older home in the country and build a much smaller domicile. Seems to me the housing market is crazy right now. There are close to 60 houses and condos on sale in Wolfville, yet people still want lots in order to build new trophy houses. I’m told that 19 of the 36 lots in the new Woodman Grove subdivision are sold already despite four pages of restrictive covenants, including no tents, no fences, no storage sheds and no carports.

Amazingly the permanent population of Wolfville has not changed appreciably in 30 years. The building boom has been to house retired folks, single people and divorced folks. We don't have families with five or six kids anymore.

Adrienne Warren of Scotia Economics has warned, however, that bustling housing markets have led to overvalued properties across Canada.

We cannot plan for the kind of volatility we are seeing these days, but we can mandate standards for construction and adaptation that make environmental sense.