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Executive Summary
Brownfields—contaminated, abandoned or under-utilized properties—litter the landscape of urban America, representing both its industrial past and potential future. In many states, the redevelopment of these previously used properties has helped revitalize distressed communities, resulting in new neighborhood businesses, housing and community facilities. Because of brownfields’ enormous potential, the federal government and many states have instituted effective measures to reduce barriers and create incentives to spur redevelopment.
New York State has long lagged behind other major heavily industrialized states in providing the legal protections and financial resources that are needed to encourage brownfield redevelopment. However, key lawmakers—Assemblymembers Sheldon Silver, Richard Brodsky and Tom DiNapoli and Senator Carl Marcellino—have recently agreed on a package of prescriptions intended to bring New York into the forefront of brownfield remediation and redevelopment. This “compromise” legislation would create a Brownfield program that seeks to clean up contaminated industrial and neighborhood land and return them to productive use. It would do so by, among other things, offering various financial incentives to private investors, municipalities and community based organizations, adopting flexible cleanup standards, and providing liability relief to parties not responsible for the contamination.
The pending “compromise” legislation, if enacted, will profoundly shape hundreds of communities and their residents for decades to come. For this reason, the legislation deserves careful scrutiny. Transforming the Urban Landscape discusses some of the best practices for brownfield development from around the country and assesses the compromise legislation pending in Albany to determine how effectively it incorporates these practices. It also compares New York’s current brownfield program and brownfield legislation pending in Albany with the more developed program in New Jersey. The Garden State, as well as the “rust belt” states of Illinois and Pennsylvania, have had considerably more success than New York in enacting laws and instituting programs to spur the redevelopment of hundreds of brownfields for housing and commercial uses.
Successful brownfield redevelopment results from striking a careful balance between the right financial incentives, planning tools, and remediation options. An effective brownfield redevelopment policy must holistically create the appropriate balance between these factors—protecting the health of communities most affected by remedial and development choices, lowering obstacles to remediation, while creating the right incentives for public and private investment in areas that have been unattractive to developers.
Examples of successful projects across the country indicate that there are four primary ways in which state legislation can promote successful brownfield redevelopment.
• Financial incentives to offset the greater costs associated with such sites and make them as, or more, attractive to private developers than pristine greenfields.
• Direct assistance—including grants and loans—to municipalities and non-profit community-based organizations.
• Flexible, but protective, cleanup standards that create opportunities to redevelop some sites that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.
• Some liability protection to those who undertake significant cleanup and redevelopment.
A successful brownfield policy, however, should strive for more than “redevelopment” of discrete parcels of land. Given that brownfields are predominantly located, and often clustered, in some of the most economically and socially distressed communities, an effective brownfield policy should also seek to promote “revitalization” of these areas. The key difference is revitalization, a “bottom-up process” that proceeds from a community-based vision of its needs and aspirations. Revitalization builds partnerships that allow negotiated solutions that incorporate community needs with development realities.
Thus, in addition to the above elements, a brownfield redevelopment policy that also promotes urban revitalization should contain the following elements:
• Strong rules and procedures to ensure that nearby communities are actively and meaningfully involved in the brownfield development process and that their concerns are seriously considered in the choice of remediation and reuse options.
• Aggressive promotion of public/private partnerships that allow local governments, community-based organizations, and private parties to engage in a collaborative planning process that incorporates the best possible remediation options consistent with community needs.
The laws and examples discussed below provide more detail on how all of the above elements have been incorporated into different redevelopment projects and one state’s brownfield policy.
This study concludes that the “compromise” brownfield legislation pending in Albany provides many of the elements necessary to pursue brownfields redevelopment—financial incentives, flexible cleanup standards, liability protection, and community planning. However, the legislation falters on promoting revitalization of the communities in which brownfields are located. In particular, the bill’s use-based cleanup option, while favoring developer choice, creates significant risks for communities that have to live with those choices. A better balance could ideally be struck in the legislation between developer choice and community interests by incorporating public participation and outreach requirements so that communities can have a role in their own cleanup choices. Without this balance, the legislation unwittingly sets up a process that ensures developer-community conflict and jeopardizes the entire development program envisioned by its authors.
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