The Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields Program helps communities identify and remediate buildings and land that may be contaminated by environmental pollutants. Sites range from shuttered factories to small abandoned gas stations and are found in rural and urban areas all across the country.
Read more: Buyers Are on the Hunt for the ‘Healthy Home’
The impact of cleanup projects can be significant for communities large and small, according to Colette Santasieri, executive director of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Technical Assistance to Brownfield Communities Program. “Brownfields sites are magnets for crime,” she told attendees of the Main Street Now conference in Pittsburgh this week, adding that the polluted properties can also contribute to sprawl and hold back economic development.
Santasieri noted that communities that make the effort to rehabilitate these parcels and put them back into use can see outsized returns due to the beneficial features of many brownfield sites, which are often located on waterways and hooked into basic infrastructure. “Waterfronts are very popular with a high real estate value,” she said. Brownfields “look like a lot of work—and they are a lot of work. But they hold such opportunity for becoming a community asset.”
For now, EPA funds and other cleanup assistance continue to be available through the three regional brownfields programs that serve communities across the country, Santasieri told conference attendees. “I am told that, right now, the plans are to still have a solicitation process for this year,” she said, noting that this step typically takes place in autumn. But she added that the timing could change depending upon whether—and in what manner—Congress decides to cut EPA funding, as the Trump administration suggested in its preliminary budget proposal.
Asked whether the entire brownfields program could be shuttered, Santasieri said it was a possibility. “All of the EPA funding is at risk,” she said, though she added she felt it wasn’t the most threatened of the agency’s offerings. “The brownfields program is not necessarily about environmental quality; it’s about redevelopment, and I hope the new administration sees that.”
—Meg White, REALTOR® Magazine
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