Turning brownfields green
City officials in Caldwell, Idaho, believe they’ve found buried treasure in their downtown, a treasure that will one day spark $100 million in economic growth.
That treasure is Indian Creek, which runs through the heart of the downtown. It was covered in the 1930s, because meat packing plants upstream polluted the creek, creating a stench. The creek today is covered in part under 6 acres of pavement and buildings. Surprisingly, the creek runs at 150 cubic feet per second and is up to 30-feet wide in some places.
Officials in Caldwell think it’s time to uncover Indian Creek and create a 130-foot wide green belt that meanders about six blocks through town. By uncovering the brownfield and turning it into a greenfield, development will follow, they predict. Ten-year projections estimate the creation of 300 to 400 urban housing units, 100,000 square feet of retail space, 200,000 square feet of office space, up to 150 hotel rooms and more than 2,700 jobs in a 1-mile radius of the project.
A city-funded demonstration project last summer uncovered a one-block portion of the creek to give the public a hint of the project’s potential, says Dennis Cannon, the city’s redevelopment coordinator. Soon after its completion, developers–including a winery–jumped at the chance to do business near the area, Cannon says. Other downtown businesses responded by cleaning up their buildings.
This fall, work begins to daylight the remaining 1,300 feet of creek. The $9 million project will be completed in late summer next year, Cannon says. The city has nine buildings, some recently vacated and others empty for some time, to demolish and remove. The city paid nearly $2.5 million to purchase the buildings, he says. A $200,000 EPA grant will pay for cleanup along the creek, which has some limited contamination.
This section of downtown has been dead economically for about four years, Cannon says. The city, in choosing to daylight the creek, believes there are no other options to stimulate growth. Long-range estimates predict that in five years the Indian Creek Daylighting Project will have sparked about $50 million in new investments in the downtown. In 10 years, about $100 million of development may occur, says Cannon, who envisions three- and four-story buildings along the creek.
“We’re dreaming big,” he says.
When dreaming of brownfields redevelopment, most developers don’t envision fields of green. Still, greenfields are a viable option for communities. They improve water and air quality, enhance wildlife habitat and control flooding. They provide open space for recreation and create waterfront access. In urban communities, they are especially important because of the limited open space.
And in some cases, greenfields can enhance economic development. Greenfields can serve as valuable economic assets by making neighborhoods more attractive to potential residents and businesses. These improvements create more jobs and increase tax revenue.
Parks generally are very political things, says Emery Bayley, technical services manager for the Environmental Coalition of South Seattle (ECOSS). While some cities don’t want a bunch of pocket parks to maintain, others see the need, he says.
Bayley points to Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle as an example of a city capitalizing on the amenities that come from green space to attract people to an area and raise property values around it. Formerly the site of a coal gasification plant that powered much of Seattle, the land was cleaned up and turned into a popular 20-acre park.
“In my mind, that’s a classic example of a city’s foresight in redeveloping an industrial site for public use,” Bayley says. “It certainly has made a difference in the value of that area.”
People are beginning to reconnect with their waterways too, and they enjoy having resources such as green space available to them, says Chuck Harmon, brownfields coordinator for the Northwest Region office of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. And they realize how important these green spaces are to the environment, he adds.
In his work, Harmon is working to form relationships with other environmental organizations, such as land trusts and watershed councils, so they too can take advantage of brownfields programs. Through these relationships, he hopes to create more opportunities for green space development.
Most brownfield redevelopment projects are typically supported by the economics of the marketplace and the attractive return on investment when a site is converted from an underutilized state into improved retail, commercial or residential reuse, Harmon says. No similar market or financial incentives exist for a site’s rehabilitation into green space.
All the same, Jim Neeley, supervisor of the King County Solid Waste Division, says in the last five years, his division has received more requests to assist in public space preservation than in years past. Many of these brownfields sites have brought a different set of problems, including contamination from drugs labs, firing ranges and petroleum tanks.
Greenfields always will be an issue for brownfields because of where brownfields typically are located: in urban areas, Neeley says. “You can’t have urban areas without parks.”
