Q & A
Michael Gainer, Buffalo ReUse
Reusing neighborhoods, rebuilding community
By Peter Koch
Michael Gainer of buffalo reuse.
Photo by kc kratt.

If you tried to sit Michael Gainer down for a cup of coffee, as I recently did, you would be forgiven for thinking that he’s overbooked at the moment. After all, he founded a not-for-profit with the David-and-Goliath task of proving hybrid deconstruction a financially viable alternative to standard building demolition (a high stakes mission in a city with more than 10,000 abandoned buildings). And now, barely a year later, Gainer’s brimming with fresh enthusiasm as he bounces from one seemingly disparate goal to another: community building, right-sizing Buffalo, youth training programs, an art gallery and architectural museum, urban gardens, and furniture making. But ReUse’s first-year track record proves they’ve got the dedication and work ethic to back up all the talk. As speaking with Gainer reveals, Buffalo ReUse is much more than a sustainable deconstruction firm; it’s a social enterprise whose mission is the long-term sustainability of our city.

How has finding a home changed Buffalo ReUse’s situation?
The warehouse has given us a place to focus our efforts and to build around. We have a community of volunteers and friends who consistently come out to events there to work and play. And that’s what our intention really is for 298 Northampton, to create a space where people feel welcome and want to be a part of what is happening. We don’t have community meetings about how to create community, we just get together and do things. And, hopefully, we’ll improve the surrounding neighborhood in the process. That’s our focus, and it’s why we’ve gone out of our way to have [events such as] pancake breakfasts and football games there. That’s the kind of easy stuff that we can do that invites people in, makes them feel welcome and creates a little buzz around what we hope to do.

Salvaged materials.
Photos by Rose Mattrey.
In the end, we really want the warehouse to be a destination orientated place, we want it to be a place where people feel welcome, a place they can get educational support or resources, a place where they can buy a door if they want to, or a place where they can come and spend an evening or an afternoon with their family. And there will be a lot of different assets that will help make that possible, like a small historical museum, a small art gallery, or even having different little educational displays about architectural materials, things that exist here in Buffalo that make Buffalo unique. All of it would underscore the importance of the work that we are doing, and, furthermore, increase their support for what we are doing. So I think that is really why we’ve started working on all of the projects that we’re involved in. It’s a way to work our way into different communities and expand our reach so that we come into contact with more people. Because, realistically, if we are just a store that sells architectural materials, then we are going to come into contact with builders and do-it-yourselfers, and maybe a few people who just happen to notice us. But if we expand our reach to the arts or education, and manage to tie them to the work we are doing, then we will dramatically expand our reach.

How is that positive buzz helping ReUse achieve its goals as it heads into its second year?
Well, that’s the type of change that we need to see in order to sell our idea to preserve abandoned houses as opposed to demolishing them. If we can create a model for preserving and beautifying houses, then we make neighborhoods more attractive for home ownership and rehabilitation, and save the unique aspects of our architectural heritage. And that’s the ultimate form of reuse, right? If we don’t have to tear it down, then it will someday be reused.

What is it you hope to do in 2008?
We’ll focus this year on alternatives to the alternative. In other words, alternatives to deconstruction, to taking down buildings, particularly in neighborhoods where we should be focusing on rehabilitation and trying to preserve houses.

Where are those neighborhoods?
The neighborhood where our warehouse is, for example, between Main St. and Jefferson, has probably the most potential of all the dilapidated ones in the city. If there is any chance of people investing it’s going to be around the Main Street corridor. You’ve got the new Artspace down the street and the Delta Sonic bringing a lot of people there, the medical corridor is expanding, and you’ve got a brand new Merriweather Library, a brand new fire hall, a brand new M&T bank, Tops is there. All these assets are there and they are just waiting to connect the dots. Those are very desirable streets for people who don’t have cars, because they offer good proximity to services: a laundromat, a bank and a grocery store, all within blocks of houses we are demolishing. We should be preserving them and making them attractive to rehabilitators, attracting investors to those blocks and raising the overall feeling in that community. I think that’s how we see our role shaping up in the community; we’ll be spearheading these small-scale, localized revitalization efforts to start bringing people back to those neighborhoods and strengthen those existing communities.

What form might those revitalization efforts take?
In the long run, we’d be working on right-sizing Buffalo within the 33 corridor, and we’d even experiment with moving houses in from outside that corridor. We’d also like to perform clean and seals, where you secure a building and clean out the inside of it to make it rehab-ready and maybe do some minor maintenance things to make sure it doesn’t deteriorate further. And, of course, we want to develop our youth training and mentoring program to help build these communities from within.

Describe how these local-level revitalization efforts might come together.
If we do a thorough assessment—and I’ve already talked to some folks at the UB’s Architecture and Planning department about this—of just a few streets to figure out how many abandoned houses there are, how many empty lots, how much rehabilitation is going on, we can create a mini plan for them. Let’s say, for example, Reilly, Eaton and Northampton Streets between Jefferson and Main. There are potentially 250-350 structures in that area. If we create a plan and propose it to the city, the commissioner [of Economic Development, Permits and Inspection Services Richard Tobe] has said if anybody has a plan for a neighborhood or for a structure, (the city) will honor that plan and won’t tear it down. So if we specify particular houses in those neighborhoods that probably are demo worthy, we can also find houses that, though they’re on the demolition list, warrant preservation because they’ve got full foundations, solid structural bones, and are generally decent houses. Then we’d propose a five-year moratorium on demolition of those houses, seal them and preserve them. In the short term, we’d try to rehabilitate them and identify partners from the community—maybe Homefront, Inc. and Habitat for Humanity—to help us. Together with them, we can really start focusing on this three-block area and we moving those houses towards completion. Any money that goes into the area will attract other people into these houses that are being preserved. So that’s the plan. It’s a finite area, but it’s a relatively intact community with an aging population and a lot of homeownership. I think that it’s an opportunity to model this more solid neighborhood planning-type of approach as opposed to the current, scattershot, all over the city approach. And people in the state are starting to catch on to this and have put together a program to grant funding for one- to three-block rehabilitation plans. I think they have $14 million available for rehab work. That’s an example of the bigger picture kind of thinking and planning that we’re embracing.

All of that sounds like a lot of work.
It is, and right now we are trying even more things. We want to get a green space program rolling in the spring where we mobilize volunteers on the weekends to try to convert abandoned lots into productive green spaces. If we can get the funding to do it, we can hire more people to focus on that and let that be their project, and then it can become a sustainable growth. If you try to do everything with a small core of people, then obviously you will be spread too thin and you won’t be able to accomplish anything at all. The goal of this organization has always been to provide meaningful jobs to people in the community. We do it through our documented success at what we do, and as we do that we gain legitimacy and credibility and we use that credibility to expand the scope of our program. We are in a position right now to hire a part-time grant writer next year to help secure funding as we look forward to expanding other aspects, like the youth job training program.
Tell me about the youth
training program.
Well, we’re not quite there yet. Right now we’re focusing on our own learning curve for training and education of the crew. We want to be sure that by the time we bring youth into the fold, we have the process down to a science and we’ve all of the equipment and tools that will allow us to do the job safely and efficiently. The program that we’re developing, though, would focus on interpersonal and social development, as well as job skills development and looking toward their future and helping them frame what that would look like. Community immersion and community projects, including deconstruction, green space development, clean and seals, salvage jobs and rehabs, would be a vehicle for that, as would other aspects of the organization such as retail and sales, furniture manufacturing and small business management. That way youths could try many different things over the course of an expanded involvement with the program of, say, one to three years.

Also, Buffalo has a void of individuals who are advocating for the needs of young people. So there’s talk of creating an advocacy network from existing organizations with some guiding principles and values that are very much focused on the needs of young people in the city. That means we’re here to help develop young people, not just give them a job. If it is a meaningless job and there’s no support and no mentor and no educational focus, then you really haven’t given them a service you have just handed them a bunch of money and said, “Go off and party it up this weekend.” But if you have a program that helps develop the whole person, part of that is personal responsibility, part of it is financial management, and so on. I see us developing a rough structure for a pilot program that would be started sometime in September with a group of maybe 10 to 15 youths.

And, finally, what’s your latest community effort?
Our upcoming peace mural project in collaboration with city schools. Hopefully it will help us make a connection with schools in neighborhoods that are surrounded by vacant houses, and together we can make an attempt to secure and beautify those houses to generally improve those neighborhoods around schools. And what’s great about these interpretations of peace and artwork is that the kids create them. So you have a creative process, an artistic process, a process that gives back to the community and raises the overall feeling of the surrounding community. And we have already seen in the newspapers people complaining about the condition of those neighborhoods surrounding schools, so this will surface as a potential solution. It will make it so people can get excited about a vacant house, where before it was a meaningless, depressing, blighted hazard.

Peter Koch is a freelance writer living in Buffalo.


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