Abandoned homes in late industrial urban America excite all manner of explanations about who and what has gone wrong—wrong enough to leave so many rowhouses, townhomes, and workers cottages derelict and empty. Some neighbors speak of households fallen on hard times, others of deindustrialization, race-based residential segregation, and policies that profit from both. Still others wax conspiratorial: “You tell me if sanitation trucks collect anything,” an elderly Black Chicagoan insisted in 2019, waving toward trash-clogged vacant lots. Hadn’t his neighbor just seen one spraying bedbugs at houses, to force remaining neighbors out?

Scholars concerned with housing have asked how cycles of devaluation and revaluation feed residential disinvestment, demolition, and displacement. My interlocutors in the American Midwest also talk of deconstruction—the time and labor-intensive practice of dismantling a building piece-by-piece with an eye to recovering components for reuse. In scrutinizing what those who live and work with derelict buildings make of them, we must also ask what they make with them. Making of and making with are both critical to unbuilding—a project that is as much about taking apart conditions that cause some buildings to come down prematurely as it is about grasping how building might unfold altogether differently.

Deconstruction is nothing new in urban America. Until the advent of mechanized demolition, its buildings came down in coherent pieces, feeding local economies in building materials. Yet the practice has taken on urgency as architects, builders, regulators and residents reckon with buildings rendered increasingly disposable. Financing and taxation arrangements disincentivize sound materials and maintenance practices. Landfills swell with construction and demolition debris. The carbon footprint of tearing down and building back up keeps expanding, even as the price of new materials and housing balloons. Advocates argue that deconstruction can ameliorate such externalities while yielding materials more durable and less toxic than anything produced today. It might even encourage designing for reuse and maintenance instead of for planned obsolescence.

Committed practitioners insist on recovering as much as possible from a building, including windows, tiles, lath, even nails. The more practically-minded focus on  materials that have established reuse and resale value, including cabinets, fixtures, floorboards, and structural lumber. My interlocutors especially prized “old-growth” joists and beams. Some re-naturalized them as the “bones” of “ancient” Northern and Southern forests, felled by settlers and by enslaved people, to feed the industrial expansions of Northern and Midwestern cities. They extolled this “forest behind the walls,” the can-do lumberjacks, sawyers, and builders who raised it, the exceptionally dense, durable, and straight wood of trees “left alone” to grow for centuries “in nature”—even the thrill of cutting into a beam still sticky with the sap of a now endangered pine species.

Such peans whitewash what America’s early urban industrialization meant for different laborers and the ecologies they altered, even as they sidestep the difficulties of deconstruction’s contemporary labor arrangements. In the years following the subprime mortgage crisis, deconstruction proponents and workforce developers in the Midwest routed their collaborations through the spectacle of so many vacant homes that needed managing. They mobilized federal relief and philanthropic grants to draw those with “barriers to employment”—often low-income Black men with criminal records that complicated regular employment—into deconstruction-training programs, promising transferable skills. Compared to mechanized demolition, deconstruction makes for fewer disturbances of toxic building materials. Yet laborers still face dusty and dirty conditions as they “harvest” trees wrapped in lead and asbestos, and studded with brackets and nails. Most proponents nevertheless insist on deconstruction’s broad benefits, folding it into “triple bottom line” approaches to “sustainability” that position people, planet, and profit as self-reinforcing values.

Scholars have long emphasized waste’s generativity. Even Mary Douglas’s classic framing of dirt as systemic exclusion meditates briefly on “dirt affirming” practices that can offer religious adherents a sense of rebirth or renewal. The early excitement I witnessed among advocates, municipal officers, materials researchers, and environmental regulators working to implement deconstruction policies in the region shifted quickly towards addressing perceived inefficiencies, streamlining production and bringing products to market “at scale.” Many remained hopeful that with the right incentives, the non-monetary benefits associated with the practice would translate into concrete profits. Cast in this light, deconstruction is not so much about unbuilding a trenchant order as it is about renewing faith in capitalism’s ability to always be opening novel profit horizons. This system metabolizes and monetizes everything, it would seem, even its own wastes.

Alongside those striving to square deconstruction with profit expectations are those who forgo efficiency logics altogether. They focus instead upon what “reclaimed” wood demands of those who would build with it. They marvel over the effort and time expended on prying wood from a structure, sorting it, and then prying metal from it lest that metal damage saws, the “crap” inevitably breathed in while retrieving and reworking boards, the disorientation of non-standard dimensions, the ease with which old-growth wood “chews up” contemporary equipment. These aren’t boards one simply “rips” with quick saw cuts. Their peculiar qualities enforce “patience” or being “careful.” Dispositions and expectations developed through working with standard, mass-produced materials and methods necessarily shift.

Plant biologists seeking a picture of accelerating ecological change recently estimated that in the year 2020, human-made objects outstripped our planet’s biological mass. The lack of housing continues to scourge the places I work, just as it scourges many other places. Amidst compounding anthropogenic mass, though, questions about housing’s lack must exceed calls to increase supply. Unbuilding a system that consistently produces housing scarcity by rendering some homes utterly disposable invites attention to the piles made by bulldozers, but also by bombs, floods, and fires. My interlocutors teach me that focusing on such awful heaps, exactly what and whom they hold, and relearning to build with all this in and on our hands can incite habits of body and mind necessary to demand something more than what is now offered us: Facile calls from our policymakers and political leaders to rebuild what we have destroyed.