What Is It?

In every aging industrial city there are sites that lie empty:  old factories, transportation centers, power switching stations, for example.  Some are surrounded by a high chain-link fence, some have mysterious barrels scattered among the weeds.  Observers suspect they might be contaminated with dangerous chemicals and heavy metals, and many of them are.  This suspicion keeps the sites from being redeveloped and they remain hazardous spots of neighborhood blight.

In the 1990s, sites like these were given a name: "brownfields." The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines brownfields as "abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination." Although the term "contaminated site" conjures images of extreme cases like Love Canal, brownfields are usually characterized by low and medium levels of environmental contamination.

There are approximately 450,000 to 600,000 brownfields in the United States, ranging from large industrial sites to small abandoned gas stations and dry-cleaners.  By their very nature, brownfields are as inseparable from issues of social, environmental, and economic justice as bank redlining or school disinvestment.  . Often the result of the shift from manufacturing to service industries, brownfields are found disproportionately in low-income urban communities. In neighborhoods that are poor and increasingly non-white, companies have walked away from unneeded, contaminated sites, leaving brownfields as a legacy of disinvestment.

But brownfields also represent opportunity.  They are often sizable parcels of land, situated near existing infrastructure, transportation routes, and labor pools. And with today's concerns about sprawling growth, their central locations provide an attractive alternative to outlying areas.  Redeveloping brownfields can provide benefits to the region and the local community.

This tool is designed to help community-based practitioners and community development corporations (CDCs) address brownfields in their communities. It provides a series of planning steps, from assessing a site to marketing it, and covers options for managing economic, legal, and environmental risks along the way.  When properly implemented, the redevelopment of a brownfield is a wonderful opportunity for community revitalization, for resurrecting a dilapidated and potentially hazardous property into one that contributes to the housing, workforce, transit and other components of a healthy neighborhood.

Last Updated: July 2003