Ecologically Renewing Old Building Like the Former Wrangell Hospital

 I have given some thought on what to do with the old Wrangell Hospital that is apparently costly for the city to keep in its inventory because of electrical and other costs. I ride a bike past the hospital sometimes when I am in town for shopping and hate to see the property’s neglect; it is aesthetically unsatisfying. It seems a fair item for a web blog. Sometimes repainting houses the exterior of the old building seems to be in pretty good shape considering that is might not have had any work on it since it was new. The fascia could be covered with marine plywood and some sort of metal because it seems to have worked like a drip edge ans is rusting away.

Environmentally speaking it is better to recondition and upgrade old buildings than build new ones generally. If a building is dangerous with unsound components it should be entirely replaced. Otherwise the manufacturing and transport costs of materials for something entirely new is greater than an upgrade. Refurbishing old buildings requires custom thought, innovation and design intelligence that isn’t necessary when building cookie cutter new units, so most people op for the later although it is environmentally and economically wasteful. The $50 per sheet. Building materials are quire expensive these days.

One can make old buildings very modern. The city might need to find some incentive for a party to become interested in investing in the old hospital when they presently haven’t a business revenue return model to do so. The Stikine River Wilderness, decline of fisheries and Old Growth forest might provide an incentive for some environmental non-profit to develop the property with ultra-modern green energy production and insulation technologies to convert the structure into a showpiece for green technology while providing a base for restoration of fishing and enhancement of forest and water quality. Maybe just getting someone like the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) of Amory Lovins to entirely convert the old hospital to green tech would require the property to be donated in exchange for fulfilling some contract to refurbish the structure.

The City need be cautious about selling the property at a discount to anyone that says if X then Y such as building N units for housing will follow Z conditions. Once the title is transferred, without some formal contract the owner needn’t do anything. For a city assembly the lure of dozens of new housing units could be an attractive bait. I Pink salmon are in the water presently.

Th 36,000 sq foot building out to have room for 15 apartments of a thousand sq feet each with ample leftover space for storage units. Maybe it could be the Jay Hammond Center for Environmental Research, or another Pioneer Home or a place to move Wrangell Law Enforcement, Fire Department and other government offices. The present Wrangell Police and Fire station is a better site for business or some kind of transportation hub and intermodal connectivity.

Vice President Harris said that if she were elected president she would build three million new homes to alleviate the ‘housing shortage’. That would employee hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens working as construction crews and drop quick proplits to Democrat party donors and building developers. Consider for a minute the environmental and economic consequences.

Rapid tract home expansion is an amazing thing to watch. While riding a bike 35,000 miles around the country looking for a job I repainted quite a few buildings. In a new suburb of Houston I rode each morning past a new home being built by a crew. After the concrete set it took just six days to put the building up, and it was a large home selling north of $300,000. From framing to setting down tresses with a cherry picker and roofing specialized crews completed a phase of construction. Its nothing like the way carpenters of old would build a home with an apprentice or two.

That style of housing is boom and bust. Refurbishing old homes is sustainable and done with local workers creating jobs in the U.S.A. to replace so many lost overseas. Millions of workers specializing in upgrading old homes is a different approach than expanding into near urban farmland with new housing tracts while leaving old homes to become new slums, ghettos and barrios closer toward urban cores.

Everything in an old home can be replaced by entirely new materials with the limit being the intelligence of the redesigner. Perfectly clear, transparent roofs could replace old ones and plug in to new support tresses wherein wiring for plug in solar voltaic roofing would go, Roofs could change color as if they were adaptive optics to let in or filter out light. Creating new materials that can upgrade old homes is a good way to sell environmentally rational materials for export to second and third world nations looking to upgrade to a western style quality of life. What cannot serve global interests at all well is the idea of using the old housing ways favored by the Biden-Harris people to clear-cut undeveloped foreign forests and build new tract homes with asphalt absorbing streets across Africa, South America and Asia.

It is important to put intention on present political actions toward present and future structural designs. Scaling up old housing patterns nationally and globally can have disastrous consequences environmentally as well as economically. Building new subdivisions requires substantial investment of public resources, probably with inefficient technologies such as flush toilets instead of solar-powered electric toilets installing miles of pipe, electrical wires, water flow management and so on. All of the new instant lawns placed by the square yard and the lawn mowers, weed eaters and chem lawn treatments are completely avoidable when old buildings are refurbished to better-than-new condition with advanced tech.