for rehabilitating historic structures. Availability of Federal, State and local funds: The United States' National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 established matching grants-in-aid, obtained through state historic preservation offices, that can be used for the acquisition and restoration of properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Similarly, community development block grants provided to municipalities by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are a major source of funds for neighborhood preservation projects. Decreased public and social costs: As these heritage settlements have been getting crowded in the past decades, people have been looking for farther lands for development. This rapid urbanization and urban sprawl cause several harms to our planet and the society. Lack of adaptive reuse of existing built assets, on a societal level, has caused disturbance due to dislocation of residents, economic decline and disruption of community life, eventually leading to abandoned and obsolete neighborhoods. Conserves energy: Old buildings represent an investment of energy and labor made at a time when costs were significantly lower. Demolition of these buildings requires new expenditures of energy to generate new building materials and to assemble them on a cleared site. Additionally, modern building systems have high life-cycle costs and operational energy costs associated with them whereas traditional masonry and stone buildings are more climate responsive. An environmental benefit of reusing built assets is identified to be the retention of the original buildings "embodied energy". According to Schultmann and Sunke, "new buildings have much higher embodied energy than those that are adaptively reused". Reddy and Jagadish support this statement by saying that "the reuse of building materials can provide substantial savings in embodied energy that would otherwise be wasted". Factors affecting adaptive reuse Building owners, architects, developers and other stakeholders undergo an in-depth process of decision making before determining whether a building should be conserved and remodeled for a different use or just demolished for the land it sits on, then develop a new building on that land. These decisions are governed by the following criteria: Economic considerations The decision to reuse or demolish built assets is driven by economic considerations such as development costs, project costs, investment returns and market. The economic costs differ from project to project and some professionals go as far as to assert that "new build is always more economical" and "renovation is universally more expensive"[1] due to their own involvement with adaptive reuse