Case Studies

Jean Hamerman, CCLR’s Deputy Director sat down with Lance Robbins, CEO of Urban Smart Growth (USG) to discuss how Lance’s approach to business and life is imprinted on USG’s success and how these lessons provide important insights into our work.

Not only are the folks at New Belgium Brewing Company the gifted brewers and creators of the delicious “Fat Tire” Ale, but they are also quite the environmentalists. When the Brewing Company began searching for a location for a second brewery in 2009, the Company established a set of criteria for their site, one of which was that the site had to be a brownfield. New Belgium purchased the 18-acre property in Asheville, North Carolina in 2012 and in May 2016, opened the doors to its second brewery.

On November 10th my friend Aidan Bass and I completed a bike tour from Boston to San Francisco. We crossed 16 states in 80 days and biked a total of 4,800 miles. We biked through almost 10 different cities where we experienced firsthand the best and worst of urban planning. From my current perch at the Center for Creative Land Recycling, this experience compelled me to look at the benefits of prioritizing cycling infrastructure and how city planning -- of which land reuse is a critical component -- can improve bikeability, especially for commuters.

Knoxville, Tennessee is riding in the 2017 Redevelopment Rodeo with two properties: a former laundry facility and a former warehouse facility.  Together with their buddies from Michigan, Oregon, Florida, Montana and New York, Knoxville’s Bad Brownfields Bulls are coming at you in Pittsburgh with one name: Dirty Laundry. Located just blocks apart in Knoxville’s downtown, they’re different sizes with different histories, and they both have the ability to contribute substantially to Knoxville’s downtown vitality.

Join the TAB providers and our rodeo partner, Brownfield Listings, and see the Rodeo at the National Brownfields Training Conference at these dates and times:

Meet just a few of our Redevelopment Rodeo and Developers Talk Deals presenters, and join us at the National Brownfields Training Conference to see some of the roughest, toughest properties out there go head to head with our wranglers.  Learn their names and histories, and don’t be a rodeo clown – join the discussion in Pittsburgh, and take home some good ideas for your local bucking brownfield!

Brownfields redevelopment is a notoriously long and involved process that draws on elements of urban planning, environmental science, public health, and real estate financing to make for a successful project. The City of Los Angeles has a nationally recognized Brownfields Program that works directly with property owners, community organizations and city agencies to assist with assessment, cleanup and revitalization of brownfield sites. Read more to learn about two projects that the City is working on.

CCLR is proud to support the San Francisco-based Achieve Program by hosting a summer intern since 2005. This case study was authored by Lorena Ortega, CCLR's 2016 Achiever, and edited by Gabriela Nuñez, CCLR's 2017 Achiever. 

The sky’s the limit when it comes to urban farming, as RAD Urban and Top Leaf Farms have proven with their project at 2201 Dwight Street, in Berkeley, CA. The CCLR team visited the property to speak to Benjamin Fahrer, co-owner, principal designer and farm manager at Top Leaf, and Jason Laub, RAD Urban’s VP and Director of Operations, to learn more about the ultimate creative use of an oft-ignored space: rooftop farming!

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.