Tear Down or Renovate? A Look at the Numbers
Last Updated: Apr 11, 2025Imagine that after years of looking, you finally found a home for sale in the neighborhood you wanted to get into for decades. The problem is that the home is not exactly up to par. It needs major renovations to remain as a livable space for the long-term future. Should you invest the money and time in renovating the home, or does it make more sense (both economic and ecological) to tear down and build a new home?
Table of Contents
- Is It Better to Tear Down or Renovate?
- Embodied Energy in Every Home
- The Time Needed to Offset Construction Related Climate Change Impacts
- The Most Sustainable Option
Is It Better to Tear Down or Renovate?
The prevailing logic states that if the value of the home you purchased is 2-3 times less than the value of the surrounding homes in your neighborhood, it makes more sense to tear down and start over. For example, if your home costs $250,000, but all of your neighbors have houses that cost upwards of $750,000, your home probably needs some significant repairs. You would get better value through completely rebuilding a home. Besides, if the renovations your home needs add up to equal or more of a new home's cost, it might not make economic sense to renovate. This is often the case when a home has structural damage that will be extremely expensive to repair.
The ecological costs of tearing down and rebuilding a home are usually hidden, ignored, or not factored into the equation. For people who sincerely care about the environmental impact of the homes they live in, the decision on whether to tear down or renovate will also factor in some of the critical ecological considerations we explore below.
Embodied Energy in Every Home
When we look at a home, we often only see the finished product. When we break the house down into all of its individual parts, we can begin to get a better idea of all of the energy needed to create that home. Every piece of lumber in the dwelling was cut from a tree in a distant forest, milled by energy-intensive machines, and transported long distances on diesel-powered trucks. Every brick in your walls was created by fossil fuel energy contributing to carbon emissions leading to climate change.
Thus, a standing home has a massive amount of embedded energy that makes it a livable shelter. As long as that home is standing and in use, that energy is going to good use. However, the moment that we tear down that home, we automatically throw that embodied energy away and have to start over.
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Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
