Going Green While Saving Green

One of the hardest things I've come across in my own home renovation is the struggle between "going green" as much as possible and staying within a reasonable budget. Much beyond buying green cleaners and recycling everything under the sun, it's really hard to make the greenest choices without the other kinds of green -- money -- to back it up.

However, this past week I think I may have found a way to not only be greener in our renovation, but to save money too.

It all started with a friend of mine who also bought an old house to rehab. She and her contractor boyfriend were telling me and my husband about a place connected with Habitat for Humanity -- called the ReStore.

Bulldozing Detroit for Farmland

It's not uncommon knowledge that one of the hardest hit areas of the recession was Detroit, the center of the now-barely-afloat automotive industry. The housing sector has been almost completely obliterated within the city limits -- whole blocks of once-thriving neighborhood has been reduced to vacant, abandoned homes left to decay along with the city.

However, a plan first suggested in the early 1990's, and now being seriously considered, hopes to change all that -- by bulldozing nearly a quarter of the city's land and its decrepit buildings, and returning the land to pre-Industrial Revolution condition -- farm land.