Environmental & Health Benefits

Contamination from superfund and brownfield sites may be the best-known environmental issue associated by vacant properties. But any community that’s been abandoned in favor of development outside its core faces serious water, air, and land contamination challenges. When we invest in our existing communities, instead of grow beyond our borders, we go a long way towards alleviating these problems:

• By reusing existing buildings and infrastructure, property reclamation efforts mean that less farmland and natural areas will be tuned into impervious surfaces (in the form of roads, parking lots, and building footprints) that increase polluted runoff into our lakes and streams.
• Revitalizing existing communities allows metropolitan areas to be less reliant on automobiles, thereby preventing increases in energy consumption and vehicular emissions that affect both air quality and water quality.
• Reclaiming abandoned properties leads to the prevention and clean up of illegal dumping.
• Sustainably reusing abandoned buildings limits demolition waste, which contributes over 65 million tons of material to our nation’s landfills and other solid waste management facilities per year.

Brownfields

Brownfields, as defined by the U.S. EPA, are real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. A brownfield can range in size from small sites such as a corner gas station or neighborhood auto shop to large structures including factories, train stations, and hospitals. The EPA estimates that there are more than 450,000 such properties in the United States.

Communities throughout the country are successfully turning brownfields into thriving centers for business, housing, and even recreation. Cleaning up and reinvesting in these properties increases local tax bases, facilitates job growth, utilizes existing infrastructure (like water and power lines), takes development pressures off of undeveloped land, and both improves and protects the environment. Redeveloping contaminated structures also helps preserve historic structures with unique architectural style and local character.

Significant progress has been made since the days when the best practice to protect citizens from these contaminated sites was to put up a fence and post a “Keep Out” sign. In 2002, President Bush signed the Brownfields Law in order to remove barriers inhibiting brownfields redevelopment. The U.S. EPA is collaborating with private sector, public sector, and non-governmental organizations to understand how recycling can work at the community scale.

There’s no end to the environmental and health benefits that can be gained though redevelopment of vacant properties. But to make redevelopment a viable option, communities need to provide a way to get the properties into the hands of owners willing to take the next steps.