Wind of change could blow through foreclosed homes

It struck me last night, after reading the Wall Street Journal piece about Cleveland artists buying and renovating some of their city’s foreclosed and abandoned homes and thus helping change neighborhoods for the better, that Cleveland and other hard-hit burgs ought to go a step beyond just helping urban pioneers buy and improve decaying properties – they ought to help those homebuyers change their home-power sources to wind, solar or some other nonpolluting renewable fuel, so that the homes will run clean and the owners can sell excess energy back to the grid.

This would make old neighborhoods cleaner and more self-sustaining, and maybe even help support local alternative-energy equipment manufacturers and suppliers. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of state and local governments already offer home alternative-energy conversion programs that provide funding or tax breaks to people who green up their houses. The federal government sure does, including a 30- percent-of-cost tax credit for installing small wind-energy systems, solar water-heating and geothermal heat pumps.

And where properties just have to be torn down, why not put up small wind farms in their place, as well as urban produce and flower gardens, so neighborhoods can sell what they make and reinvest it in their own services and infrastructure?

As President Obama says, why solve only one problem at a time when so many things need fixing?