Managing our own sustainability
When you think about recycling, does downtown come to mind? Probably not, but when you take the big blue bins out of the picture and come at it from a different angle, maybe it should. Several months ago, one of the speakers at a Main Street conference spent 60 fascinating minutes sharing the future with a roomful of downtown managers and one of the points made loud and clear was that downtowns should OWN sustainability.
The desire to extend, reuse and recycle for the good of our neighborhoods and the planet has gone mainstream.
As giant retailers like Wal-Mart rush to embrace it, sustainability has reached what is known as mega-trend status. ‘All well and good,’ you may be thinking, ‘but what does this have to do with downtown Shreveport?’ Quite a lot, it turns out. Let’s first consider sustainability in terms of recycling. In our households we separate bottles, newspaper and cans in the ultimate hope that they will be used to create something else. Downtown encourages the recycling of something much larger – buildings.
The Downtown Development Authority, Downtown Shreveport Development Corporation and our other downtown partners are pushing for our historic buildings to be re-created in a process called adaptive reuse – which is taking something old and giving it a new reason for being. People often fear the cost of rehabilitating a historic building but should consider rehab versus the cost of new in terms of energy consumption. To build new means growing the forest from which to harvest materials, manufacturing the new construction materials, and transporting those materials.
Throw into the mix the relative transient nature of new buildings. Do we really expect newly-constructed buildings to be here in 100 years? When you realize that this adaptive reuse of old buildings will be more affordable as new-build construction costs rise, it makes sense on any number of levels.
Several months ago, Shreveport architect Kevin Bryan purchased and rehabbed an underappreciated, downon-its-heels century-old building in the 700 block of Texas Street. The result— soaring ceilings, old brick, beautiful wood beams – has been nothing short of breathtaking. There were many things that won him over to the project, but one of the biggest was the bang for the buck. When Bryan’s crew pulled old paneling off walls, exposed the brick and removed the suspended ceiling they found the original bones of the building supported by big, solid, sturdy timber that even if available today would be prohibitively expensive. “What we found in the wood structure alone would be worth a small fortune,” he told us. It’s important to remember when you walk around downtown that many of the beams, bricks and stone that went into creating our historic buildings are forever gone.
The quarries are tapped out, the old brick masons are dead; the old growth lumber is long since used up. In 2010, the Urban Land Institute did a sustainability study for some communities in Utah and made the point that downtowns are sustainable in other ways – they already have the civic places, the infrastructure and existing structures that attract citizens and the essential services needed to support development. “If downtowns can be sustained,” the report says, “the pressure to build ever increasingly outward from the cities can be lessened, saving commuting costs, reducing petroleum consumption and reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. Downtowns provide the exciting opportunity for mixing uses: employment, retail and housing and leisure activities.” Of all the trends that are out there, this would be a great one for downtown Shreveport to own!
Liz Swaine is the executive director of the Downtown Development Authority. She can be reached at [email protected].
