Blight, job loss, and environmental contamination are pervasive in post-industrial hubs like the Menomonee River Valley in Milwaukee or the Lower Frankford Creek Watershed in Philadelphia. Many of these areas are also inundated with brownfields, defined by the federal government as “abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.” Brownfield remediation and revitalization are complicated processes that require a solid understanding of environmental contamination, mapping, stakeholder management, end-use planning, and finance. ELI’s latest landmark environmental justice publication, the Brownfield Revitalization in Green Healthy Towns (BRIGHT) Guide, unpacks each of these topics and provides local communities with tools and resources to organize and lead the process of revitalization for themselves.

The guide empowers just, equitable, and self-defined sustainable development. Chapters in the guide walk readers through the process of creating and implementing a corridor project to produce positive health, ecological, and economic outcomes in overburdened communities. Critically, the guide is a living document that will improve content as new information and best practices emerge. ELI encourages all readers to send more information on corridor planning that staff can integrate into the text.

Last summer, EPA’s Brownfields Program updated its analysis of the population living within 0.5 and 3 miles of brownfields sites that received EPA funding. While about 44 percent of the U.S. population lives within 3 miles of a site, nearby communities were described as “more minority, low income, linguistically isolated, and less likely to have a high school education than the U.S. population as a whole.” This analysis complements a well-documented body of literature that highlights the correlation of race and class with exposures to environmental hazards.

Brownfields are significant pieces of a larger story of environmental racism, wherein marginalized people and communities face a plethora of compounding oppressive forces that directly damage their economic and physical wellbeing and harm their relationship with the land and environment. Specifically, many past government policies and practices, like redlining and the use of restrictive covenants, produced racially segregated cities and thus allowed investments into public infrastructure, economic development, and environmental protection to be concentrated in predominantly wealthy, white areas, often leaving the communities of color to live amongst industrial toxicity. One such community is the southwest area of Fresno, California, which hosts approximately 65 of the city of Fresno’s 130 brownfield parcels, demonstrating one of the many consequences of environmental racism.

While targeted economic development in environmentally overburdened areas has promise, historically, such efforts have displaced long-time residents in a process called green gentrification. The remediation of brownfields and growth of more sustainable end uses often results in increased property taxes, housing prices, and retail prices in the area. Without intentional policies and practices to account for this, economically disadvantaged community members are often replaced by people who can afford the higher cost of living.

Brownfield revitalization can perpetuate environmental racism if anti-gentrification measures are not implemented in conjunction with development. Anti-gentrification strategies vary depending on the needs of a community, the status of the target area’s housing market, and the presence of prohibitive city or state laws, among other factors.

In corridor projects, community members occupy key decisionmaking roles, allowing them to address the interconnected needs of their neighborhoods. Within the context of brownfields and blight, the corridor project model allows the remediation of a variety of parcels that are often too small to attract redevelopment on their own. The model incorporates end uses that can improve a community’s public health, climate resiliency, and economic prosperity.

Between 2010 and 2017, EPA financed about 83 corridor projects through its Area Wide Planning Grant program. Initiated in 2010, the program offered funding and technical assistance to communities surrounded by brownfields. But the Trump administration gutted the program’s funding after 2017, pursuing alternative means of brownfield remediation that lacked an explicit focus on community engagement. Fortunately, the Biden administration has expressed a desire to rectify this, as demonstrated by the $1.5 billion set aside in the bipartisan infrastructure law to “scale up community-led brownfields revitalization.”

While this is encouraging, the BRIGHT Guide recognizes that federal funding fluctuates as administrations vary in their commitments to sustainable development and environmental justice. In the potential absence of a federal funding model, communities can turn to the BRIGHT Guide to find lessons learned through previous corridor projects and area-wide plans to guide redevelopment in their own neighborhoods.