Megan McNally in front of her home in Buffalo. She purchased the house for $3,800. (Photo by Emma Jacobs)
In many older cities, some
neighborhoods are known for
their abandoned houses. A
lot of these will decay beyond
repair and end up as debris
in landfills. Emma Jacobs
takes us to one hard-hit
neighborhood, where one house
has become a laboratory for
doing green construction:
Transcript
n many older cities, some
neighborhoods are known for
their abandoned houses. A
lot of these will decay beyond
repair and end up as debris
in landfills. Emma Jacobs
takes us to one hard-hit
neighborhood, where one house
has become a laboratory for
doing green construction:
(sound of climbing steps)
Last year, at age 20, Megan McNally bought a house.
”This is the front room. Um, this is gonna be the bathroom. Doesn’t look like much now. It’ll get there.”
Not just any house. She wanted to find a project in this neighborhood to tie to the environmental science she studied during the year.
While home from college for a summer, McNally had been working with a nonprofit, Buffalo Reuse. It works in a neighborhood of East Buffalo with rows of abandoned homes. She paid $3800 dollars at the city’s foreclosure auction for a small, wood-frame house that had been vacant for three years.
“I really wanted to help some effort in Buffalo and so I was trying to brainstorm and I sat down with Michael and we sort of came up with this idea of buying a house.”
(sound of truck)
Michael is–Michael Grainer, who runs Buffalo Reuse. We make a coffee run and he tells me this neighborhood is part of a city whose population has shrunk by half.
“What we’re trying to do is to build a base of projects that are undergoing some kind of transformation and also lots that are undergoing a transformation.”
McNally’s house looks like it’s in good shape, but it had also taken a lot of abuse.
“On the outside, it looks really great. You could move in tomorrow. But as I came in here the first weekend it was leaks that people didn’t take care of. There was…this floor we had to cut out because it was all rotted from black mold.”
McNally had no prior knowledge of home repair. Transforming this house soon escalated as she found she would be replacing the plumbing and heating. But in some way, she’s also found her lack of experience to be an asset in recruiting help.
Ken Hicks is helping to measure out a part for a radiator in the front room. He turned up near dusk one day last winter. McNally was under the house checking the foundation, and Hicks, a construction worker was helping out the owner next door. He saw her feet sticking out from underneath. When she crawled out they started talking.
“It was a big joke, you know. We went back and forth and I said, you know, it was just so weird to see you in that situation and that situation and that predicament. And we just started from there,”
Slow work during a down economy means Hicks spends more time on volunteer jobs. He’s become one of the main people McNally turns to with questions about plumbing and carpentry.
“Being really young, you can ask a lot of stupid questions, and people go, ‘Oh man, this girl,’ but then go on and like, answer it in a way where maybe they wouldn’t be so open with somebody else.”
“Anything you can possibly do wrong has been done has been done in this house. But all those things that I’m talking about are now corrected, and there’s so much more knowledge here.”
There’s still months of work left, but McNally knows she will be living here soon. She has learned both a lot of construction skills and a lot about teaching, herself. She holds workshops to help the neighbors who are left take on their own properties. Her house, still unfinished, is a good training ground for beginners. McNally also realized people are less afraid to approach her with their questions than the experts she first had teaching.
“It’s hard putting things together. And, I don’t know, there’s been times where you just want to sit down and you get so frustrated that you don’t know how to do something that I think it’s really important to have people there who say, whatever, it’s ok and it’s ok that you don’t know everything, because you know, once you figure it out or ask questions, or just do it (laughs) and hope that things work out for the best, they usually do.”
For The Environment Report, I’m Emma Jacobs.