City hopes reclaimed bricks can build jobs, sustainability.
From the Baltimore Sun front-page feature on Humanim.
Baltimore City has awarded Details, a social enterprise of Humanim, with a contract to deconstruct vacant houses and sell the harvested materials in a pilot – program. This program will remove blight and pollution as part of the Vacants to Value initiative without straining landfills. Equally important, the pilot will create needed jobs for residents of the city.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said job creation is a key to the deconstruction contract. “It’s about blight elimination, but we’re doing more than that. We’re also doing workforce development,” she said. “It is more challenging, but I think through careful collaboration and planning we found a model that is scalable, something that will work.”
Details has grown to nearly 45 employees and has already deconstruct more than 50 privately owned homes and commercial structures since it started doing deconstruction work about two years ago.