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NEW ORLEANS — With a torn roof, buckling supports and mildewed walls, the 90-year-old house on Valmont Street appears one more sad reminder of the destructive forces of Hurricane Katrina.

But Willie White finds value amid the wreckage.

The doors and trim were fashioned from old-growth red cypress — now largely gone from Southern coastal forests. The floor was hewed from the timber of long-leaf white pine. So for 12 days, White put a crew to work in this house, tearing out lumber with resale value of about $12,000.

“A lot of times, these salvage materials are better than the new materials,” White said. “They just don’t make this stuff anymore.”

“Deconstruct” advocates

White is part of a movement, nurtured by Pacific Northwest dollars and expertise, that seeks to “deconstruct” rather than demolish a portion of houses abandoned in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane. Proponents say recycling these materials saves valuable New Orleans heritage, and creates more jobs and less waste than bulldozing houses and hauling the debris to the dump.

So far, among the 9,000 hurricane-wrecked homes that were demolished, about 200 were partially salvaged. With the city still tackling a backlog of about 30,000 blighted homes, there is plenty of potential for more recycling.

“If we were able to get 10 percent of what’s left, I think that would be outstanding,” said Rick Denhart, a Portland-based deconstruction expert who moved to New Orleans to help manage a program launched by Mercy Corps, a Northwest aid group with headquarters in Portland and an office in Seattle.

Denhart has helped forge a network of small entrepreneurs, such as White, and nonprofits that help salvage, sell and install the recycled material.

But this requires plenty of labor in a town where it can be hard to recruit enough crews willing to take on the tedious and often exhausting work.

Volunteers continue to be a significant force in a recovery effort that now appears likely to stretch out over the next decade or more.

Many groups

Church groups, student groups and nonprofits have sent thousands of people to New Orleans. So have corporations, including Starbucks, which plans its largest volunteer effort during the company’s four-day New Orleans leadership conference that begins today. That meeting is expected to draw some 10,000 employees.

Each employee is expected to donate four to six hours of labor painting houses and murals, planting trees, removing debris, building playgrounds and taking on other tasks.

“There was a passion among everyone who was planning this conference that part of our effort needed to be helping rebuild New Orleans,” said Rodney Hines, director of community investments for Starbucks, which is funneling $5 million into post-Katrina recovery.

In some flood-damaged neighborhoods, such as Broadmoor, the recovery is well under way. Some homes have been rebuilt on slightly raised foundations, while others are built on 6- to 8-foot-high perches in hopes of avoiding future high water.

But the Broadmoor neighborhood still is a patchwork that includes many abandoned buildings. In September, a team from Rebuilding Together, a Mercy Corps partner in New Orleans, tackled one of these houses and found a refrigerator that had been shut tight ever since Katrina.

“It was still pretty gross when we opened the door,” said Jonathan Lindquist, 23, a volunteer from New Jersey.

Homesites now fields

The hardest-hit neighborhoods are in the Lower 9th Ward. Three years after Katrina, some blocks have an oddly rural ambience as big fields of tall grass reclaim homesites.

“They will come back. Slowly but surely they will come back,” said Kenneth Turner, who is part of a sparse band of homesteaders on his street. “People should come back for their ancestors, who started this here.”

But the population of Orleans Parish, which encompasses much of the city’s heart, inched up only about 1 percentage point over the past year. As of August, New Orleans had 71 percent of its pre-storm population, and it appears that most of the people who want to return already have made their move.

Many small businesses also have been slow to rebound.

Before the storm, White’s salvage company worked out of a warehouse that was shared with a spicery, safety-products company, beauty parlor and printing companies. All of those businesses have gone and not returned.

A volume industry

White remained behind, in hopes the disaster would make his business boom. But he has found deconstruction is a tough sell to the demolition companies that hold the contracts to take down damaged houses. They are paid by the cubic yard, so the more debris they haul off to the dump, the more money they make.

The demolition companies have allowed limited retrievals of doors and windows. But White — after collecting flooring and other bulkier material from five houses in June — found his salvage work came to an abrupt end. That’s because the recycling cut too deeply into the contractor’s waste volume.

Mercy Corps has been trying to bolster support for deconstruction among government officials and the demolition companies. To help document the economics of recycling, it hired White to take on a 3,600-square-foot home damaged by Katrina. That job soaked up $28,120 in labor and other costs but yielded used building materials worth a salvage-industry value of $29,918, a Mercy Corps report said.

“We could be doing a lot more of this recycling,” White said. “There’s always people in need of these materials.”

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com