Turning Brown Green

Activists say abandoned urban fields have bright futures

San Francisco Examiner - September 30, 1998

RICHMOND - Forget for now the waist-high weeds, the rusted shopping cart, the old stove, the bloody bandage and the rest of the field of bad dreams and imagine the possibilities: a 32-acre, 2.5-mile stretch of urban greenery and renewal.

Property values would climb and business would be drawn to Central Richmond, the theory goes, if an unusual coalition of business, environmental and community groups has its way and the "brownfield" is transformed to green.

The field, a former Santa Fe Railroad right-of-way that was turned over to Richmond in 1979 and has since fallen on hard times, is one of about 40,000 California brownfields - once-thriving commercial or industrial properties now idle or abandoned and often located in minority communities.

Another notable in the category is San Francisco's Mission Bay, the 300-acre, publicly subsidized Catellus Development project that is projected to produce $1 billion in property taxes when complete.

Now comes a campaign, announced Tuesday, to recycle the abandoned properties. To do so will require state funding that has been hitherto lacking and the protection of potential buyers from liability related to soil contamination - often a stumbling block for potential developers and financial institutions.

"This is not a pretty site," Edith Pepper, policy analyst of the San Francisco-based California Center for Land Recycling, said Tuesday overlooking the trash near 20th and Ohio streets, "but it could be. It could be reused for something that would benefit the surrounding community."

Across Richmond, there is a prime example of a brownfield success story: Marina Bay, a development combining commercial, light industrial, four parks and residential units from apartments to condominiums to town houses to single family detached homes.

"We turned a formerly contaminated site into a premier site," said Richmond Mayor Rosemary Corbin, who joined like-minded urban land recyclers at the old railroad site for a news conference Tuesday.

In the interest of having more success stories to tell, the California Center for Land Recycling, a project of the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit land conservation group based in San Francisco, sought support from a broad coalition to press the case for urban renewal.

Tuesday, the 58 groups signed a letter to California gubernatorial candidates Lt. Gov. Gray Davis and Attorney General Dan Lungren asking them to make brownfield restoration a priority, upon election, as a solution to sprawl and urban decay.

"Reusing brownfield sites not only revitalizes depressed inner cities, cleans up contamination and creates jobs, but can be harnessed as a powerful tool for curbing urban sprawl - an increasingly pressing issue as California braces for explosive population growth in the next century," the center said in a report Tuesday.

Richmond's Corbin said the city in the 1980s developed plans for the 2.5-mile right-of-way but the project had to be abandoned because of "the state take-away in the early 1990s," when local governments' share of tax dollars was reduced. This year, the city's request for $40,000 from the state for a new round of planning for the brownfield was removed in the budget-writing process.

Corbin, a former librarian and mayor for the past five years, argued that Richmond can see development "leapfrog" over its 55 square miles. The leap begins in San Francisco and reaches to eastern Contra Costa County, where massive development is under way.

"Recycling inner city property is the best kind of recycling because it produces economic development," said Corbin.

She added, "It is the kind of thing you come to expect in more affluent communities and we deserve the same."

Brownfields, said Pepper of the California Center for Land Recycling, have "real or perceived contamination, and, commonly, developers are wary of pursuing opportunities because of environmental liability and high cleanup costs."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, when appropriate, issues what it calls "comfort letters" to potential developers. While the letters do not rule out litigation to force cleanup, they can "comfort" developers by assuring them the government is satisfied with a property's status.

Corbin said this is one of the tools at her disposal in the campaign for land recycling, and, she added, the EPA and Richmond worked creatively to resolve problems that arose with Marina Bay.

For example, Richmond was permitted to place petroleum-contaminated soil under the roadbed of Interstate 580, and saved $1 million in the cleanup process.

Similarly, the 58 business, environmental and community groups that Tuesday urged Lungren and Davis to make land recycling a priority seeks creative solutions. They include Bank of America, California Manufacturers Association, California League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund, the West County Toxics Coalition and Oracle Corp.

©1998 San Francisco Examiner

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