What Happened?
Municipalities are taking advantage of federal grant programs to rehabilitate struggling communities and make better use of land and resources.
EPA Brownfields
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency selected 20 communities to receive Brownfield grants to revitalize neighborhoods and strengthen local economies. The EPA will divide $4 million in Brownfields Area-Wide Planning grants to 20 different community initiatives designed to aid economically distressed neighborhoods through sustainable revitalization projects.
The goal of the grant program is to engage neighborhood stakeholders, local governments and the private sector in designing and implementing strategies to redevelop communities with widespread improvement and sustainability projects. Each grant recipient will receive up to $200,000 to help create Brownfields plans for land and resource reuse in conjunction with community assets such as:
- Housing
- Recreation and open space
- Employment
- Education
- Healthcare facilities
- Social services
- Transportation options
- Infrastructure and commerce
The winning projects proposed inclusive, locally-driven strategies to foster public-private redevelopment to improve quality of life and economic sustainability. The communitywide, systematic approaches aim to create livable communities through support for jobs, recreation, housing and increased tax base. Resuses of Brownfield sites include:
- Advanced manufacturing businesses
- Recreation hubs
- Mixed-income housing
- Community centers that serve youth and unskilled workers
- Leveraging existing infrastructure to support a walkable, transit-oriented community
- Capitalizing on tax increment finance districts
- Leveraging partnerships with local groups, businesses and institutions
In Huntington, West Virginia, a $200,000 Brownfields grant will be used to study and plan the redevelopment of 78 acres of flat, industrial land. The goal is to reconstruct the land to house manufacturing facilities, hotels, housing and a baseball stadium. The local government can use the grant to purchase the land and launch the redevelopment projects, or use the funding as leverage to get all property owners involved on board with the revitalization strategy. Either route will require the city to develop a strategic plan detailing all costs and benefits for each redevelopment initiative, the Herald-Dispatch reported.
Similarly, Hickory, North Carolina, received a Brownfields grant to launch community outreach and redevelopment planning activities involved in the assessment of eligible properties suspected of being negatively impacted with petroleum and hazardous substances. The city will perform two phases of environmental assessments within a targeted urban revitalization area to ensure the sites are marketable for adaptive use.
Brownfields for Climate Change
As the impacts of climate change become more of a reality in states across the country, many communities are leveraging their Brownfields Area-Wide Planning grants to make their communities more resilient to drastic fluctuations in weather patterns and the physical environment. The EPA is encouraging Brownfield grant applicants to consider whether the proposed reuses for their sites take into account local changing climate conditions such as:
- Drastic changes in temperatures
- Drastic changes in precipitation
- Extreme weather events
- Increased risk of wildfires
- Rising sea levels
- Changing dates for ground thaw/freezing
- Changing flood zones
- Increased salt water intrusion
- Altered groundwater tables
The EPA recommends Brownfield projects redevelop distressed land into multifunctional resources that reduce the social, economic and environmental impact of climate change.
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