Rescuing materials to give them new life

In a sequestered Pearl City neighborhood where green space around homes is uncommonly abundant and the streets are named after tall trees, 77 vacant houses await demolition — and that saddens Quinn Vittum.

But Vittum is also happy that pieces of these old homes have been recycled, representing progress in reusing construction materials from a large player in housing redevelopment on Oahu: the U.S. military.

Vittum is executive director of Re-use Hawaii, a nonprofit company that last year deconstructed 64 Oahu homes from which salvageable materials were resold.

Re-use wanted to deconstruct the 77 Pearl City homes at Marine Corps Base Hawaii Manana Housing but was only able to negotiate a deal allowing it to strip and cart off easily removable parts, including doors, kitchen cabinets and water heaters.

“It’s really awesome because there’s so much of it,” Vittum said. “There’s 77 times everything. It’s a really great opportunity.” Yet he also adds a down note when thinking of everything that will go to a landfill: “It’s tricky because your heart breaks when you see all the waste.”

Vittum isn’t complaining. He’s grateful to get any work from the military housing sector.

That’s because his company’s operating model doesn’t work well financially for the military or private companies doing military housing.

One factor in the misalignment is the inability of the owner of the Manana homes to reap a tax benefit that Re-use offers as a nonprofit, because the owner is a partnership between a private company and the federal government. This benefit typically makes the cost of deconstruction about equal to or less than the cost of demolition for a typical homeowner.

Another factor is that federal law requires that contractors working on military housing construction projects pay workers prevailing industry wages, which in this case are more than double what Re-use usually pays and led to Re-use charging more.

These two reasons make the cost of deconstruction difficult to stomach for firms that have large contracts to redevelop military housing.

“Deconstruction is time-intensive,” said Mark Krzyzanowski, development project manager for Hunt Military Communities, which agreed to pay Re-use for a relatively quick harvest of the homes, which dated to the early 1960s and were known as Navy Manana.

“This is our first dip in the waters going this route,” added Rich Montoya, construction project manager with Hunt Military Communities, which owns Manana Housing as part of a deal with the military to provide the Navy with more modern homes for service members. “It’s a move in the right direction. It’s a very positive paradigm shift.”

Hunt subcontracted for Re-use to spend 10 days grabbing cabinets, doors that include Z-braced barn-style hardwood garage closet doors, 40- and 50-gallon water heaters, wooden closet hanger rods, concrete blocks at the bottom of rain gutter drain spouts, a few windows and select wallboards that were easy to cut out from non-load-bearing exterior walls from the 77 homes.

By contrast, Re-use typically would spend eight to 10 days deconstructing a single home.

Diamond Farrar, leader of the six-man Re-use team that included two truck drivers to transport salvaged materials to Re-use facilities, calculated that it takes him only two minutes “and some change” to remove a framed window with a reciprocating saw and a pry bar. Yet there wasn’t enough time to get more than a few after the higher-priority materials.

“This is the good stuff,” he added, knocking on 1-inch-thick mahogany planks used to build exterior walls of each home.

These wallboards along with three-quarter-inch-thick mahogany boards used for interior partition walls make Vittum’s heart ache. “It’s just really nice stuff,” he said, estimating that each house contains 2,000 lineal feet of 6-inch-wide mahogany boards. “That’s like a forest worth. It’s sad.”

Still, Vittum said the Manana Housing project, which wrapped up for Re-use last month, represents progress that he hopes will produce more recycling at future military housing redevelopment projects.

“We’re trying to take things to the next level,” he said.

Two previous military housing recycle jobs for Re-use were a pilot project in 2015 at Schofield Barracks that involved only kitchen cabinets and a job last year at Fort Shafter that involved wallboards.

At Manana Housing, Re-use obtained so much material that it needed to send much of it to an overflow warehouse. At the company’s retail outlet, which includes an 18,000-square-foot warehouse and 18,000-square-foot lumberyard in Kakaako, the plywood cabinets with a birch veneer are priced from $20 to $75 apiece.

Carolyn Murren, assistant warehouse manager, said Re-use pulled out around 400 cabinets including floor, wall and pantry cabinets.

Back in Pearl City, after Hunt demolishes what remains of the homes along Cedar Drive, Birch Circle and Date Drive, there are no plans to develop the property, which is adjacent to newer subdivisions in the Manana military neighborhood. Krzyzanowski said new homes were built for the Navy in other communities to offset the loss at Manana where the property will be land banked.