Square Feet - In Syracuse, Reviving Old Neighborhoods the Green Way - NYTimes.com SYRACUSE - Standing on the windblown rooftop of a twisty glass building here, Ed Bogucz waved one arm toward the downtown skyline and the other toward a neighborhood of abandoned houses and vacant lots where he is investing in green-home technology. The whole area, he said, is a laboratory. "The thing about Syracuse is that it's at a great scale," he said. It's big enough to have density and small enough that you can study the whole thing. Mr. Bogucz's organization, the Syracuse Center of Excellence, has teamed with the Syracuse University School of Architecture and a local nonprofit developer called Home HeadQuarters in a unusual real estate experiment. The center, one of six founded within the last decade by the state under former Gov. George E. Pataki to nurture promising industries in college towns, is investing in companies that use less fossil fuel in building affordable homes, outfitting them and supplying them with energy. The center will soon move from an office park into the five-story building where Mr. Bogucz was standing, where it will monitor demonstration technologies. The architecture school, meanwhile, is leading a project to put some of those technologies into effect in the Near West Side, a dilapidated neighborhood near downtown, where construction has begun on homes that emit almost no carbon and cost less than $150,000 to build. Three such homes, already in contract, should be complete by summer. Mr. Bogucz, who pronounces his name BO-gish, said that after distributing $200 million in public money to dozens of green building companies since its founding, the center is currently monitoring many awards and $5 million in grants for start-ups. "It's the ultimate in patient capital," he said, "and Syracuse is at the forefront of sustainability." In homes under construction on the Near West Side, two pilot companies are working at opposite ends of a house's life. One is e2e Materials, an Ithaca company that makes particleboard and walls from soy flour and fibers of natural grasslike materials. By buying the flour left over from soy production and using perennial supplies of lightweight fibers rather than diminishing stocks of lumber, e2e can significantly lower the amount of dedicated energy it takes to construct a house, according to the company's chief executive, Patrick Govang. This avoided fuel use, Mr. Govang added, means that, over time, e2e's product will generate significantly fewer carbon emissions than wood. The company also recently started trying to grow flax within the state, he said. Mr. Govang has run the company since it was spun off a Cornell University experiment in fiber design in 2007. He said the latest iteration of e2e's material, which he plans to produce in standard four- by eight-foot sizes by spring, could go into walls and floors. "A typical floor system in a home costs about $24 per square foot," he said. His company expects to sell at half that price. But e2e has not yet achieved economies of scale in its manufacturing, and it is relying on the Center of Excellence to cover the gap between what it charges and what clients can pay. The center has also paid to use e2e materials to make the reception desk at its new headquarters.. The other business working in the Near West Side with the center's support faces no shortage of raw material. Northeast Natural Homes, a father and son outfit, competes with demolition contractors by "deconstructing" old homes, one plank at a time, rather than razing them. The company then resells the lumber for new building projects. The father, Kevin Stack, said that he had trained 16 people to pull 12,100 pounds of lumber from a little 89-year-old house on the Near West Side, all of it stronger and more reliably usable than lumber from a distributor. These two companies see huge market opportunities once they can achieve economies of scale. Mr. Govang pointed out that his material's protein made it a natural fire retardant, rendering formaldehyde unnecessary. And he said that by growing fibers regionally, as he hopes to do soon with help from government sources, he would continually replenish the supply. Mr. Stack said that in cities like Buffalo and Flint, Mich., with thousands of abandoned homes, deconstruction could compete with traditional demolition. "You could say this is all stored carbon that would go into a landfill," he said. If the United States adopts a cap on carbon emissions, he argued, home builders could buy salvaged lumber and then sell the right to emit the amount of carbon that would have burned if the lumber had gone into a landfill. Mr. Stack's son, Josh, sees plenty of opportunity in his hometown. "There are 1,450 abandoned homes in Syracuse," he said. Some of Northeast Natural Homes" lumber will go into one of the new houses that the architecture school has nurtured. Developed by Home HeadQuarters, which has renovated homes in the neighborhood for decades, these houses will be compact and offer reconfigurable interiors. The one using Northeast Natural Homes" recovered lumber, designed by the New York architecture firm of Cook & Fox, will feature elaborate dividers that serve as movable walls. Mr. Bogucz is negotiating to reach a price at which e2e's material can go into the house's movable walls, given the architecture school's mandate that the house cost less than $150,000 to build. Even though the houses are selling at low prices, they show high ambition. In another experiment, two New York architecture firms - Architecture Research Office and Della Valle Bernheimer - have designed a home to meet a standard called Passivhaus, which requires a building exterior so airtight that residents hardly need to use boilers or air-conditioners. Jared Della Valle, a partner in Della Valle Bernheimer, described it as sealing in heat and cool, "like a sheep." Mr. Bogucz, a trained engineer, has also invested in demonstrations of systems that use excess heat from electricity or water to heat homes. Champions of the Syracuse experiments know that most people associate their city with industrial decline and urban emptiness. But Mr. Bogucz said his investments could change that. Noting how the fledgling e2e had impressed Cook & Fox, Mr. Bogucz made a prediction. "Within five years, I expect e2e will have annual revenues of several hundred million dollars and several hundred employees," he said. He also predicts that 50 full-time deconstruction experts will be at work by 2015 - because old houses will still outnumber new ones for a while.