Reclaiming Brownfields

A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Reuse of Contaminated Properties

Richard C. Hula, Laura A. Reese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317070627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The environmental legacy of past industrial and agricultural development can simultaneously pose serious threats to human health and impede reuse of contaminated land. The urban landscape around the world is littered with sites contaminated with a variety of toxins produced by past use. Both public and private sector actors are often reluctant to make significant investments in properties that simultaneously pose significant potential human health issues, and may demand complex and very expensive cleanups. The chapters in this volume recognize that land and water contamination are now almost universally acknowledged to be key social, economic, and political issues. How multiple societies have attempted to craft and implement public policy to deal with these issues provides the central focus of the book. The volume is unique in that it provides a global comparative perspective on brownfield policy and examples of its use in a variety of countries.

PART I
Policy

One need not be an urban policy scholar to recognize that the environmental legacy of past industrial and agricultural development can simultaneously post serious threats to human health and impede reuse of contaminated land. The urban landscape in particular, is littered with sites contaminated with a variety of toxins produced by past use. Not surprisingly both public and private sector actors are often reluctant to make significant investments in properties that pose potential human health issues, and may demand complex and very expensive cleanups. And, environmental contamination is global in scope since pollution, development and land-use patterns are seldom constrained by national borders.

Environmental contamination is common in cities in both the developed and developing world. Even those cities most successful in adapting to a changing global economy continue to face significant challenges, including land area in which redevelopment is severely limited by environmental contamination from earlier usages. Environmental contamination raises several policy concerns. One, is the public health implications of contamination, particularly in relation to the confluence of equity, geographic location, poverty, and race (i.e. environmental justice). Another concern is the need to redevelop contaminated sites to reduce health risks and enhance neighborhood economic development. Efforts to encourage the redevelopment of such sites have become an important theme in both environmental and urban policy as many nations have implemented new programs to redevelop land parcels with contamination. Efforts to reintegrate contaminated land into the productive economy involve not only political and economic issues, but raise fundamental questions of environmental science. Examples range from the efficacy of remediation and containment strategies, to the proper identification of allowable contamination levels.

A review of existing literature suggests a number of important questions that serve as the focus of this book

Question 1: What do policies look like? How are programs organized? Does it matter?

There are fundamental differences in how public authorities organize efforts to reclaim contaminated properties. For example, such efforts in the United States have historically been centralized at the federal level, and have operated on what students of administration refer to as a command and control decision making process. Indeed, such systems of environmental regulation exist throughout the world. Recently, however, this system has been challenged in the United States by very aggressive state level efforts emphasizing public-private partnerships and voluntary actions. Typically the role of the federal Environmental Protection Agency is nearly irrelevant in many redevelopment efforts. Intergovernmental systems differ and the US provides only one model. The chapters in this volume illustrate how urban brownfield challenges are treated in other countries and include explicit cross-national comparisons.

Question 2: What strategies are used to promote redevelopment?

Efforts to return contaminated land to productive economic use typically rely on significant private investment. Public funding is often reserved for site cleanup efforts when no responsibility party can be identified, and subsidies to reduce development costs below those of alternative sites are required. The particular form of development subsidies varies a great deal ranging from infrastructure construction, tax relief or direct payment. The number and complexity of these mechanisms makes generalizations difficult. Considering policy options on a global level extends the array of both existing and considered policy options.

Question 3: What is the role of community preferences?

Cleanup and redevelopment efforts are often a critical concern of the communities in which the properties are located. However, there tends to be little formal requirement for community or neighborhood involvement in redevelopment planning. Most communities, nevertheless, attempt to create a forum for some neighborhood level participation. Usually this participation provides for neighborhood review rather than initiation of projects. Like health care and public health, redevelopment planning is a complex, technical issue that often requires more than lay knowledge to adequately grasp the nuances of policy decisions. As such, the extent to which meaningful citizen involvement can be sustained and community preferences incorporated into decision-making processes is likely to vary by project, community, and national context. This raises the question of the appropriate policy role of citizens most directly impacted by brownfield projects. To what extent should local communities be involved in local redevelopment efforts, and how is the desired participation level best achieved?

These questions are addressed in chapters written from perspectives around the globe. The book itself is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on extant public policy related to brownfields through a global lens. The chapters illustrate policies, intergovernmental arrangements, relations between the public and private sectors, and provide historical background on these issues in a variety of national contexts. The Chapters in Part II provide detailed examples of the implementation of brownfield policies specifically addressing questions of community preferences and participation. They also extend the discussion of the organizational arrangements through which policies are implemented and evaluated. The final section presents case studies of specific brownfield efforts cutting across the three questions just noted. The set of US cases show different organizational arrangements and policy solutions in action, specifically questioning how outcomes might differ for competing interests and communities.

Overall, the book provides academics and policy-makers with a global perspective on an increasingly critical health and development issue by providing answers to some of the important questions related to the development, implementation, and evaluation of brownfield remediation and redevelopment policy.

Policy Variation and Diffusion

As with most substantive polices, efforts to identify, clean, and redevelop contaminated properties have taken a number of forms across different jurisdictions. There are a great number of factors that would lead one to expect such a wide variance. Policy scholars have identified a myriad of factors impacting policy outcomes including context, institutional structure, public and elite preferences, culture and history. Such factors are recognized and discussed in several chapters. In an analysis of the impact of a variety of forces on US state programs, Hula identifies the severity of contamination problems as the strongest predictor of whether a state has a robust brownfield program. Rydualova and colleagues also emphasize the importance of context for the Czech Republic. They note the key historical role of a centralized planned economy and the contemporary impact of multinational actors in Czech domestic environmental policy. In addition to such traditional endogenous factors, the existence of various models and policy types serve as independent variables that can impact the design of policy. Interestingly such pressures are likely to make policy more similar as jurisdictions observe (and perhaps learn from) each other. The possible importance of such proximity is demonstrated in Hula’s review of the distribution of brownfield innovation in the United States. This analysis identifies a relatively strong geographic clustering of states active in brownfield redevelopment. Although the specific chapters in this section take idiosyncratic perspectives on brownfield policy, all of the authors provide some general support for the diffusion hypothesis; at least in the United States and Europe, there has been a significant policy convergence in the past decade. The following section on policy implementation and evaluation also highlights the diffusion trend.

Policy Characteristics

A significant effort in this section is devoted to describing the parameters of brownfield policy in a variety of settings. It is hardly surprising that there is a good deal of variation in how brownfield policy is defined and implemented across political jurisdictions. This is true not only at a national level, but also at the state level in the United States. Note, however, that while program characteristics certainly differ, broad patterns can be identified. Lowham documents such patterns in US state policies by applying cluster analysis to attributes of a number of state level programs, and in this way identifies a limited number of recurring program structures. Overall, program types can be described on several independent dimensions.

Definition

Policy scholars often argue that one must identify the problem definition incorporated into policy to understand the policy process (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Portz 1996; Rochefort and Cobb 1994). Of course, problem definition is seldom straightforward. Typically problem definitions are complex, incomplete, and implicit. One important indicator of the complexity of public policy surrounding brownfield cleanup and redevelopment is the significant variation in how brownfields are defined in different settings. Although the term brownfield is widely used, the specific meaning attached to the term depends very much on the context in which it used. Perhaps the most common definition cited is that championed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA defines brownfields as:

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 (Kaiser 1998).

The United States EPA definition (or slight variants of it) has been cited by a number of authors in this volume. Alternate definitions do, however, exist. For example, CABERNET (Concerted Action on Brownfield and Economic Regeneration Network), a European expert network active in brownfield redevelopment defines brownfields as sites which (CABERNET 2010):1

• have been affected by former uses of the site or surrounding land,

• are derelict or underused,

• are mainly in fully or partly developed urban areas,

• require intervention to bring them back to beneficial use,

• may have real or perceived contamination problems.

The apparent consistency across these definitions is deceiving. On closer examination the seeming consensus on what constitutes a brownfield disappears. Within the United States, individual states have adopted quite different legal definitions of a brownfield. In some states, for example, properties with obsolete structures that may retard redevelopment are considered brownfields, whether or not the site suffers from environmental contamination.2 Levels of permissible contamination also vary over time and across state boundaries. Indeed, a number of state “reforms” have been based on adjusting permissible toxic levels for a variety of substances. The effect of such a redefinition is, of course, to reduce the number of brownfields without any change in what is actually to be found in the ground or water.

Variation in what constitutes a brownfield becomes even greater when one moves to a cross-national view of programs. Perhaps most important is the absence of the implicit assumption contained in US policy that while brownfields can have substantial contamination, the most toxic sites are in a completely separate category. The federal government through the authority provided in the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) has responsibility for these sites.3 Thus in the United States the term brownfield is generally not applied to sites that raise the most serious threats to human health. This is not the case in much of the world where the term is applied to a much broader class of sites, including those most heavily contaminated and most dangerous.4

Technical issues also contribute to debates over the appropriate definition of a brownfield. There are, for example, no universally recognized criteria for what constitutes contamination. All of the chapters in this section discuss the importance of having target sites reach some minimum or acceptable level of contamination. It is the responsibility of individual jurisdictions to operationalize what constitutes an “acceptable” level of toxins in the environment, however. Differences are almost inevitable given a lack of a clear consensus within the scientific community as to what sort of standards are necessary to protect human health.5 Thus, a site that is formally a brownfield in one jurisdiction may not be a brownfield at all in another jurisdiction. As a result, efforts to compare program outcomes in the two jurisdictions would be very difficult (Donati, Rossi and Brebbia 2004; Whelan 2004).

Program Goals

Public policy is by its very nature a complex business. Government decisions are inevitably driven by multiple goals and priorities. Not surprisingly government programs almost always reflect this complexity. All of the chapters in this section illustrate the fact that brownfield programs have multiple goals. To be sure, much of the initial impetus for a brownfield policy was a desire to minimize potential threats to human health from ground and water contamination. There is, however, broad consensus that as programs have matured, other goals have become very important. The growing emphasis on economic development as a program goal is a particularly clear and recurring theme. Indeed, researchers argue that economic redevelopment has actually eclipsed the protection of human health as the dominant goal in most programs and has come to define the parameters of the discourse surrounding brownfield policy.

The shift from an environmental program to one that emphasizes economic issues is explained by several factors. There is, for example, uncertainty about actual health risks. The magnitude or even the existence of contamination is often unknown at any given site. Even when the source and magnitude of contamination are known, the degree of human risk is often hotly debated given that the science underlying risk analysis is far from exact. Complicating factors include the fact that contamination often has differential impacts on specific populations (children, for example, are often more susceptible to environmental toxins), and multiple toxins often coexist in a given site, giving rise to unpredictable interaction effects. This ambiguity around actual levels of risk allows for debate and possible reorienting of the program to include new and “complementary” goals.

The goal of cleaning contaminated sites is often coupled with a second environmental goal: saving undeveloped land. Typically, undeveloped sites, or greenfields, are widely viewed as a valuable and diminishing resource. Land use advocates point with alarm to a dramatic reduction in land use density. The net effect of this demographic change is to rapidly increase the consumption of land for development even where there is very modest population pressure. Some observers see in brownfields an alternative to the continued widespread development of greenfields. While land preservatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: POLICY
• PART II: IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION
• PART III: BROWNFIELD CASE STUDIES
• Index