Land Recycling News

Published on September 20, 2019

By Sarah Sieloff, Executive Director, with thanks to Brahm Ahmadi and David Greensfelder for background information and their reflections

Retail is a notoriously complex component of real estate.  Boost your knowledge and demystify retail by joining CCLR for a free webinar on September 25 featuring David Greensfelder, retail expert, developer, and CCLR Board member.  Every redevelopment practitioner needs to know what questions to ask about retail, so don’t miss out – this is a unique opportunity to hear directly from an expert who regularly wrangles retail in tough redevelopment projects, including one of the toughest out there, a grocery store in a historically marginalized neighborhood.  Read on, and register here.

By Ignacio Dayrit, Director of Programs

Posted September 13, 2019

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to release “Requests for APPLICATIONS” (RFA)  for brownfield assessment, cleanup and revolving loan fund grants in a few weeks. The intent is to have the grant application season completed before the National Brownfields Conference in Los Angeles beginning December 10.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently announced a generous grant from the Pritzker Family Fund to help open the India Basin Shoreline Park in southeast San Francisco as part of the Blue Greenway The park is slated to be completed by 2025, 15 years after CCLR assisted the non-profit SF Parks Alliance with its successful application for a planning and community outreach grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brownfields program.

Racial segregation in housing…was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders. Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods. Rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations, and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs.  

After Hurricane Harvey, Paul Krugman asked, “Why can’t we get cities right?”  Perhaps it’s because when we imagine a sustainable city, we are imagining something none of us has ever experienced, as Azby Brown notes in his 2009 book Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan.  While imagining a new future can be exhilarating, it can also be overwhelming.  As Puerto Rico rebuilds its electrical grid, Houston continues to recover from floods, Mexico City clears away rubble following the recent earthquake and the Florida Keys begin the long process of determining how and where to rebuild, we may do well to turn to Japan for inspiration, circa 1603.

With the need for infrastructure investment greater than ever, we're still waiting on Washington.

We’re all still waiting for Washington to move on infrastructure. Decades of deferred maintenance have built up and now costs hundreds of billions of dollars every year in unnecessary time, fuel and deadly accidents. While our old systems decay, we dare not dream of the next generation infrastructure that could give us the edge on our global competition, many of whom are way ahead of us in the infrastructure race.

But we need to start dreaming big again. Too many communities aren’t aging well. And today we find our built environment badly neglected at a time when changes in our natural environment seem to be accelerating. Meanwhile, our rapidly advancing economy is changing the needs of households, businesses and government at all levels.

At CCLR, we’ve been hearing a great deal of interest lately about landfills.  This sparked our April workshop in San Jose, CA, where Jeff Ludlow, Principal at Langan Engineering, gave two presentations about landfill post-closure redevelopment.  Other communities have reached out with questions about capping landfills or the feasibility of building on landfills.  Landfills pose unique challenges, but they also offer powerful opportunities for redevelopment. 

The fourth biennial Sierra Fund conference, focused on finding ways to reclaim and remediate mine-scarred lands in the Sierra, took place at the Sacramento State University on May 8th and 9th. The full slate of programming was kicked off by Elizabeth “Izzy” Martin, CEO of the Sierra Fund, who spoke about the grip that absentee landowners have over the land in the Sierra. The stage for a frank conversation about land-use and equity was further set by Lawrie Mott, a former scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, who begged the question: “Can our 20th Century water systems survive the 21st Century climate reality?”

The Center for Creative Land Recycling has launched a new page for Sustainable Remediation Resources (hyperlink) through the Online State Resources Page! This page compiles state and national resources about sustainable and green remediation, such as EPA’s Climate Smart Brownfields manual, NY Department of Environmental Conservation documents and presentations, EPA Green Remediation best practices and more.