Recycled Homes Creating Sustainable and Affordable Living in Birmingham

Harvard graduate from Alabama starts a nonprofit organization to create jobs and provide safe housing for Birmingham residents.

“Dilapidated. Vacant. Abandoned.” This is how Harvard graduate, Build UP founder, and CEO, Dr. Mark Martin, describes the housing situation in Ensley, a community in the greater Birmingham area.

Preservation and progress seem to be in opposition in our ever-developing nation, but is it possible to bring the two together? Build UP, a non-profit organization in Birmingham, Ala., is doing just that, through transporting and restoring homes scheduled for demolition. These houses come from Homewood and Mountain Brook, and are brought to Ensley, where Build UP restores the houses through their apprenticeship program.

"The hands-on work for the students entails renovating houses in their community to create dignified homes for Ensley families."

In the past year, Build UP started forming plans to transport homes from wealthier neighborhoods of Birmingham and refurbishing them to be used as safe homes for Ensley’s citizens. This is a new initiative for Build UP, but one that seems to hold much promise of sustainability.

Martin founded Build UP in 2015 as a means to educate Ensley high schoolers on real estate in an academic setting, while also certifying them for entry-level construction work. The hands-on work for the students entails renovating houses in their community to create dignified homes for Ensley families. Through these apprenticeships, Martin plans to bring more housing into Ensley that the students will renovate and can eventually purchase.

“Ensley’s housing situation is about as bad as I’ve seen, and that’s what happened when you have turn of the century homes from early 1900s that have seen 60 years of decline,” says Martin.

Not only does this provide better housing, but it also creates an increased job market for the once-booming community of Ensley. According to Build UP, Ensley was the epicenter for social life in Birmingham. Many plant workers and streetcar passengers would spend their evenings in Ensley due to the intersection of two streetcar lines. The lively nightlife, consisting of music and dancing, attracted people from miles around. However, in the 1970s many steel plants closed down and, as a result, Ensley’s population of 40,000 declined to 4,500 today. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 25% of these 4,500 are living below the poverty line.

“All that housing stock was left for dead and people have not had the financial means or the economic incentive to invest in it, so it’s seen nothing but decline and fallen into a pretty dilapidated state,” says Martin. This is why Build UP is dedicated to working toward eradicating poverty in Ensley by training and empowering the youth in their community in an effort to provide a more stable future financially and through providing safe housing.

Renovating the existing homes does not come without some financial risk. “At the very least, it’s going to cost you $60,000, or so, to bring it up to code--to do it the right way,” says Martin. There is also a lot of work that has to be put into these old homes to create a safe living environment. “We’re talking about replacing electrical systems, plumbing, HVAC systems. Some of these homes have never had HVAC. There’s not a lot you can do with it for cheap. Occasionally you’ll find a place with running water and electrical and somebody will throw a coat of paint on it, but that’s still not a safe home because it likely has outdated electrical and probably has mold or mildew,” says Martin.

Another issue Build UP faces is the land in Ensley actually depreciates the value of a home. “The moment that you put $70,000 into the house, it’s nice and it looks wonderful and it’s a dignified place for someone to live, but you could never sell it for that amount. And that’s the big challenge.”

“I had a home offered to me over a year ago and I turned it down because I just didn’t have the vision then,” says Martin. “I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know that it could be financially sustainable. I think it was ahead of our time in some ways.”

Todd Kirkpatrick of MT Kirkpatrick House Movers says house moving is over one hundred years old. “House moving has been around since the 1800s,” Kirkpatrick says. “It’s still mind boggling to us how many people don’t know about house moving.”

The process of moving a house takes a minimum of five days from the very start of the process through to the end, but it can take longer depending on the house structure. “The house we brought to Ensley actually had to be cut in half, which is somewhat complicated.”

Transporting homes is sustainable both environmentally and economically. Moving houses from communities in Homewood and Mountain Brook essentially pays for itself. Greater Birmingham Homebuilders Association president, Colt Byrom, says donating keeps the older homes from going to landfills and provides the homeowner with a tax write-off that should cover the cost of moving it.

“We’re excited about it because it really is the only viable way that we see to bring safe-to-abide like-new homes to Ensley without spending $72,000,” says Martin. “We believe that we are going to be able to get out the door for closer to $30,000, and that’s after laying down a new foundation and acquiring the land, which has very little value.”

The vision for Ensley is for the community to be revitalized, both economically and socially. Martin believes prices first must rise to create an incentive for investment. “A lot of people talk about gentrification being an issue in Birmingham, but I don’t believe that. I think it’s an issue in very, very select parts of Birmingham. People who own land never complain about gentrification. Part of what our mission is, is to get our young people into home ownership position so they can be the ones accumulating wealth and growing assets.”

Martin says that bringing in nicer, newer homes, combined with getting local young people, leaders, families and communities who can be a part of stabilizing Ensley, could be a catalyst to drive prices up. “In Ensley’s case, and in lots of places in Birmingham, you really do need prices to go up quite a bit to even make it worth while for people to come back and build again because it’s just not feasible as it is,” says Martin.

According to Grover, Build UP currently has five Mountain Brook homes sitting on a plot of land in Troy, Ala., waiting to be transported to Ensley. They are awaiting approval from the Birmingham City Council, but the homes should be transported to Ensley within the next six months.