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2004 Smart Growth in Brownfield Communities Grant Recipients
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- Land of Sky Regional Council (LOSC), Asheville, North Carolina
- Coalition for Utah's Future
- Michigan Suburbs Alliance
- City of Gary, Indiana
- Lawrence Community Works, Lawrence, Massachusetts
- Save the Bay, Inc., Providence, Rhode Island
- Louisiana Regional Planning Commission (RPC)
EPA's Smart Growth in Brownfield Communities grant program supports the efforts of communities to integrate smart growth principles and practices into their brownfield redevelopment programs, related planning and/or revitalization activities. It is meant to help communities encourage redevelopment of brownfield properties and improve environmental quality by offering support to reduce regulatory and market barriers and link redevelopment with open space preservation. The grants support efforts to improve the regulatory climate for infill development through smart growth policy approaches and practices, improve the market climate for brownfield development through infill development, and link infill development to open space preservation.
Land of Sky Regional Council (LOSC), Asheville, North Carolina
LOSC will identify state and local regulations and policies that are barriers to brownfield and infill redevelopment. Upon completion of their analysis, LOSC will work with state and local officials and local and regional developers to improve the market, regulatory, and policy climate for environmentally beneficial redevelopment efforts.
Update: In August 2007, LOSC released Stimulating Infill and Brownfield Development in the Land-of-Sky Region, which discusses the barriers to brownfield redevelopment and presents possible solutions.
Coalition for Utah's Future
The coalition will create a model to measure the financial return of redevelopment proposals, helping local planning officials determine the effect of their zoning standards and procedures on redevelopment potential and encouraging more environmentally sensitive growth.
Update: In 2006, Envision Utah released Brownfield Redevelopment Solutions: Recovering a Community's Hidden Assets (PDF) (86 pp, 2.6 MB), a useful compendium of tips, procedures, and other information to assist those interested in brownfields redevelopment, including identifying properties, land use considerations by the buyer, placing properties under contract, the due diligence process, managing environmental liabilities, final approval on zoning and land use, and closing on the contract and financing.
Michigan Suburbs Alliance
The Michigan Suburbs Alliance will use the funding to support the Redevelopment Readiness Certification Resource Center. The Resource Center will provide technical assistance to communities seeking to make environmentally sound infill and brownfield redevelopment more attractive.
Update: In 2006, the Michigan Suburbs Alliance released Redevelopment Ready CommunitiesSM: Best Practices and Scoring System (PDF) (30 pp, 660 K), a report on a set of best practices and a certification system developed through a partnership between public- and private-sector development interests. The Redevelopment Ready Communities program
encourages mature suburbs to bolster their competitive attractiveness by making the development process more efficient and less complicated. The program helps cities acquire the skills, knowledge, and methods that enable them to compete for redevelopment opportunities. This system for certifying communities as "redevelopment ready" benefits both older communities struggling to revitalize themselves and developers. The publication includes the scoring system used to rate a community's redevelopment climate and the strategies a community may adopt to improve it.
As of 2009, eight communities in metro Detroit had been certified as redevelopment ready, and an additional 11 were in the process of being certified.
City of Gary, Indiana
The city will review its municipal codes and ordinances and identify local regulatory barriers to brownfield redevelopment. Upon completion of its review, the city will revise and adopt new codes that will incorporate smart growth practices and principles to brownfields and infill redevelopment and greenspace protection and restoration in the city.
Lawrence Community Works, Lawrence, Massachusetts
The funding will support the Reviviendo Gateway Initiative, a successful community planning effort that is transforming the city of Lawrence through infill and brownfield redevelopment, through community planning charrettes to create new community green space, cleaning up contaminated and vacant properties, and aligning local regulatory reforms to state smart growth incentives.
Save the Bay, Inc., Providence, Rhode Island
Save the Bay will use the funding to support a project that uses smart growth principles to improve the regulatory and administrative climate that governs the development of coastal brownfields. Save the Bay will review existing regulations, analyze the history of their own redevelopment project, conduct outreach workshops on coastal brownfield redevelopment, and produce a guidebook that will help facilitate future coastal brownfield redevelopment projects that are environmentally responsible.
Update: Products from this grant include a study analyzing the regulatory and policy context for redeveloping coastal brownfields in Rhode Island, a history of the Save the Bay Center redevelopment project on Providence's Fields Point site, and an abridged version of the analysis of the regulatory climate for redeveloping coastal brownfields in Rhode Island focuses on the policy lessons learned from the project. Click here to read more about these products.
Louisiana Regional Planning Commission (RPC)
RPC will apply smart growth principles and community-based approaches to look at environmentally friendly redevelopment of a lakefront study area that lies in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Upon completion of its analysis, RPC will conduct a site plan analysis, community charrette, and economic feasibility and transportation studies and create a policy document for use as a smart growth template for other regional infill sites.