Raze the abandoned houses and put the land into growing corn and soybeans. As farmland it would be far more valuable than vacant and unsalable house lots.
What to do with all that scrap lumber from the teardown of the abandoned housing and industrial base? Not into a landfill, but into a power generation system that uses something called Plasma Trash Reduction, and as a byproduct, generates electricity on the spot.
www.theplasmasolution.com/index2.html
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This is “green energy” on steroids, and one technology that actually lives up to its hype. At one swoop, highly toxic industrial waste is neutralized, otherwise irrecoverable resources are freed up, vast quantities of trash that would otherwise end up in a landfill are put to productive use, and the co-generation of power from both the syngas produced from the process and capturing the heat energy for additional power generation make the system self-sustaining, so long as the feed of trash as “fuel” proceeds on an adequate supply basis. Existing landfills and “brownfields” are stripped of soil pollution potential. A side product is the formation of a silica “slag”, a form of igneous stone that may be crushed to aggregate, or formed into building material. Depending on the nature of the trash put through the process, this slag may also be a valuable ore for reclaimed metallic elements, as the various elements tend to crystallize out in different strata within the slag, making the concentration much more uniform than found in typical mined ores.
A whole new industrial complex may be built on the ruins of the former industrial complex. And the landscape will be transformed into one of reclaimed utility for multiple non-industrial purposes.
I’m somewhat familiar with that process ... if you feed it all the demo’d buildings you would be introducing a LOT of lead , lead paint , lead pipes , leaded glass ... how good is it from an air quality perspective?