One of the greenest decisions a home buyer can make is to use the structures that already exist in our environment. The energy, materials, and resources required to build a new home are wasteful, when there are perfectly good structures available. It is certainly true that many of these older homes are in less desirable neighborhoods, but when left empty and run down, this plight will spread.

Someone must stand up and reuse these homes. Fix them, turn them, make them more efficient. To build new and green is perhaps the easy route, but the more wholisticly beneficial path is to start with the structure, the resource, the home that already exists.

Do you really expect people to voluntarily move into run-down, crime laden areas just for the sake of being green? I think that is just foolish. Who would put their own lives let alone the lives of their family and friends at risk like that?

I understand the notion of using the buildings we already have, but at some point that just doesn't work.

I agree that using the existing resources is ideal, but sometimes its just not feasible. The schools are bad, the crime rate is high, the amenities could be far away...... There are so many reasons that these houses could be undesirable. On the other hand, there is nothing holding us back from using the resources from these homes to build new ones.

The key here is not to waste the resources and not so much not wasting the home.

I would love to buy a "used" home but I am with some of the other posters that moving into a run-down, economically depressed area just isn't feasible for my family. Safety comes first. I do think there needs to be some kind of effort to help "save" or salvage these communities but expecting the consumer to do so may be unrealistic.

This general attitude is what worries me. Just as the populations spread from the cities as growth and mobility became controlling factors, so too will the empty run down neighborhood spread away from the city center. Who will stop the tide and decide that enough is enough and that are resources are better spent working with what we have already constructed rather than always desiring to work with virgin materials on virgin land.