Seattle issued 356 permits to demolish houses and duplexes in 2025, and 309 more from January through October 2026. Few of those houses were worn out. Most came down because the land is worth more with a new building on it, and the city’s new middle-housing rules push harder in that direction.
Demolition takes two machine operators two or three days. Taking the same house apart by hand, so its doors, floors and old-growth fir can be sold, takes a crew of about five for up to two weeks. Studio Viridian priced both for a model house: 1,500 square feet, built before 1940, at 2026 Seattle prices. Seattle contractors don’t publish deconstruction bids, so every figure is an estimate built from published cases.
Demolition costs about $22,000. Taking the house apart and selling the parts through stores costs about $19,000 more. Of five ways to do it, only one pays today.
Five ways to take a house down, compared with demolition
Extra cost per house over a $22,000 demolition, in thousands of dollars. Dots are central estimates; gray lines show the plausible range.
The ranges are wide because salvage value varies so much from house to house. Same-lot reuse counts the city’s $4,000 deconstruction incentive; without it, the route about breaks even. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap, per-house model.
Hybrid deconstruction, which hand-strips the valuable parts and machine-demolishes the rest, cuts the gap to about $8,000. Donating the material to a nonprofit can bring the owner’s cost down to $2,000 to $8,000, but only through a tax deduction. Same-lot reuse puts the salvage into the new building on the same lot: no truck, no warehouse, no store markdown. It comes out about $4,000 ahead in the central case, a figure that counts the city’s incentive.
Most of the money is labor
Deconstruction adds about $30,000 to the job. Most of it, $18,000, is the crew’s premium over demolition; the rest pays to truck, sort, store and sell the parts. After markdowns the salvage brings in about $10,000, and the owner skips about $1,000 of dump fees.
Where the extra $30,000 goes, and what comes back
Full deconstruction with store resale, central case for the model house, in thousands of dollars
Store prices run about a third to half of new. The house’s salvage lists for about $15,000; about $9,750 is actually collected after markdowns and leftovers. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
Value also leaks every time a part changes hands, from house to truck to warehouse to shelf to buyer. A 1920s five-panel fir door sells used for about $175, and the store pays the salvager 20 to 40 percent of that. Removing it intact takes about $50 of labor. Built into a new house on the same lot, the same door replaces one that would cost $600.
Small next to the project, large next to the bid
The gap looks very different depending on what it is measured against. Portland reached the same conclusion after ten years of requiring deconstruction: it typically costs less than 1 percent of a residential project.
The same $19,000, framed three ways
The deconstruction gap as a share of each base
The developer’s profit is 12 percent on cost. The project is a four-townhouse redevelopment at about $3 million to $3.6 million; planning estimates, not a specific lot’s budget.
So, when deconstruction loses, it usually loses on time, certainty and hassle, not money. Still, 5 percent of a developer’s profit is enough to say no if nothing else is offered. The city’s $4,000 deconstruction incentive covers less than a quarter of the crew premium and does nothing for time. About 45 projects have used it since 2022, against 750 single-family demolition permits.
What a saved ton is worth
Deconstruction spends about 400 crew-hours to keep about 5 tons of reusable material out of the landfill. That is about $6,000 of labor a ton, against about $175 a ton to dump it. Counting the hidden costs of disposal doesn’t close the gap: a ton of mixed debris really costs about $220 once climate, health and long-term landfill care are added, so the dump fee already covers most of it.
What it costs to save a ton, and what the ton is worth
Per ton of reusable material saved by full deconstruction, in dollars, with each benefit counted once
Crew-hours to save one ton
28of about 80 hours are paid for by buyers and skipped dump fees
Each square is one crew-hour. The other 52 or so hours happen only if someone chooses to pay for them.
Harm spared is mostly climate, at $100 per ton of CO2e, about the figure Washington’s utility regulator uses. The buyers’ price already reflects the new lumber they no longer buy, so it isn’t added again. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
The hidden cost is waste, not disposal. A ton of reusable old-growth fir thrown away costs about $1,000, mostly in forest carbon and in the new wood someone must buy to replace it.
An expensive way to cut carbon
A saved ton of old fir keeps about 1.33 tons of CO2e out of the air, from new lumber that isn’t made and a forest that isn’t cut. At store resale, that works out to about $2,900 per ton of CO2e, more than capturing carbon from the air with machines.
What a ton of carbon costs, by route and by alternative
Dollars per metric ton of CO2e avoided, at the cost to society (incentives and tax deductions left out)
Ranges, not quotes. The two store-resale ranges run past the chart’s edge, to about $4,300 and $6,700. The heat-pump figure is the paper’s estimate from Seattle quotes; the weatherization figure, from a Michigan field trial, is contested. Sources: Closing the Teardown Gap; RMI; Climeworks.
Counted in crew hours, the difference is wider still. The 400 hours one house takes would weatherize about ten homes or switch about eight from gas furnaces to heat pumps.
What 100 crew-hours keep out of the air
Metric tons of CO2e avoided per 100 hours of work
Rough estimates: about 40 crew-hours to weatherize a home and 50 to switch one to a heat pump. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
Best practice changes the picture. Selling the material before the house comes down, hand-stripping only the valuable parts and choosing the houses with the most valuable material bring the cost to about $650 per ton of CO2e. At that size, what else careful takedown buys could plausibly cover the rest: lead-safe work near children, training for a new worker, wood from trees that were centuries old. The workers’ own living footprint changes none of this, because it is the same whatever the money buys.
After the valuables are gone
Hand-stripping leaves about 28 tons of framing, plaster, painted wood, roofing and scraps, besides about 55 tons of concrete and brick that Seattle already requires to be recycled. Today about 20 of the 28 tons are landfilled. A hybrid takedown sorted into six to eight streams on site would cut that to about 11, and graded reclaimed lumber, biochar and plaster recycling could cut it to about 8 within a decade.
Where the rest of the house goes
Tons per house, for the model house’s 28 tons of non-masonry material
Estimates; one weighed job would replace them. Clean wood burned as “hog fuel” releases its stored carbon at once, though official inventories count it as zero. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
Five moves that change the game
The paper’s strategy stops trying to sell salvage. It sells the developer a better redevelopment, one in which deconstruction is the cheapest route. No single move closes the gap; together they make deconstruction the obvious choice on the right houses.
- A guaranteed price.A fixed price no higher than the owner’s demolition quote, offered only on houses a “yield score” says can clear it. A licensed partner does the work.
- Give the developer time.Take the house down during plan review under the city’s early deconstruction permit, so demolition becomes the slower option.
- Pre-sell, don’t warehouse.List the contents before the house comes down, with buyer deposits, and send the rest to Earthwise’s new salvage lumber warehouse.
- Put the house back into the building.Design the new units from the old house’s inventory: framing remilled into floors and treads, doors reused, brick laid as pavers.
- Propose a deposit, and supply the proof.Only the city can adopt one. Viridian can write it, back it with pilot data and build the same incentive into its own contracts now.
A yield score is a quick estimate of how much valuable material a house holds, made before anyone steps inside: a credit score for salvage, drawn from permit data, the assessor’s record and a short phone video. A 1912 Craftsman scores far higher than a 1955 rambler. On a high-scoring house, the moves stack.
How stacking closes the gap on a good house
Extra cost over demolition, in thousands of dollars, as each layer is added
Illustrative, central case. Not every layer applies to every house; that is what the yield score decides. The incentive layer assumes the city’s pilot is still open. The $2,100 left at the end is room for Viridian’s coordination margin. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
The deposit is the move that only the city can make, and Seattle has none today. The paper proposes one modeled on Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey: about $15,000 to $20,000 collected with the demolition permit, refunded in full when the takedown reuses at least 20 percent of the building by weight, partly for less, and not at all for straight demolition. With a deposit, the cost of waste falls on the default instead of on the few owners who volunteer.
With an $18,000 deposit, demolition stops being the cheap option
The owner’s total cost under a refundable deposit, in thousands of dollars
A proposal, not current Seattle law. Refund thresholds follow the city’s existing 20 percent reuse bar for early deconstruction permits. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
The timing matters. Seattle Public Utilities says it plans to ramp up deconstruction in 2027 “through a potential requirement or expanded incentives,” and the city’s construction-waste diversion has been flat at about 72 percent since 2014, against a goal of at least 80 percent by 2030. A proposal that arrives with local pilot data while the rule is being drafted is far more likely to shape it.
The money isn’t in the salvage
About 350 houses come down in Seattle each year, holding about $5 million of salvage at shelf prices. A 20 percent share of what’s recovered would top out near $0.7 million a year, and it would take an army of sellers to earn. The larger sums sit in the developer’s time, the new materials a building skips buying and the checking a reuse rule would need.
Where the money is in Seattle, a year
Rough annual ranges, in millions of dollars
The pools overlap in places (avoided purchases and salvage value describe some of the same material), so they shouldn’t be added up. The rose bar is the revenue idea first tested in Cultivating Demand and Amplifying Impact. Source: Closing the Teardown Gap.
What others have learned
Reuse pays where supply is matched to a specific new project and where the structure is kept. It stalls where a rule runs ahead of its market or where recycling is counted as reuse.
What works
- Pairing a donor building with a receiving project (New Horizon, Rotor DC)
- Designing from the stock on hand: K.118 in Winterthur is about 70 percent reused parts
- Keeping the structure: Sydney’s Quay Quarter Tower kept 65 percent of its frame and 95 percent of its core
- Giving the measuring tool away, as EC3 did
- A rule plus a market, phased in (Portland, Vancouver)
What hasn’t
- Requiring deconstruction before a market exists (Milwaukee, 2018; suspended)
- Counting recycling as success: France’s take-back program handled 10.7 million tons in 2024 and reused 29,000
- Donations on aggressive appraisals (Mann v. United States, 2021)
- Retail resale of low-value stock
- A marketplace on its own, without committed projects
None of this waits on a carbon price. Charging every teardown for the harm its debris causes would favor deconstruction by only about $700 a house. The levers are less labor per ton, salvage sold before the house comes down, the old house built into the new one and a rule that rewards reuse, not diversion.