Dealing with residual contamination under 'clean to use': US insights on national practices and potential roles for local communities

Abstract

Local communities with derelict and contaminated sites cannot avoid a conflict between their economic development and environmental protection objectives, since stronger mitigation standards can raise site preparation costs and thus can slow redevelopment. This paper considers the limited capacity of community-based organisations to address those trade-offs and compares different strategies for greater community control and protection in reclamation and redevelopment of such sites. The context for the community decisions in many instances is one in which a choice must be made between more thorough clean-up of past environmental problems in the course of the redevelopment effort or a lower level of remediation, reliant on land use and/or engineering controls to protect the environment and human health. What is omitted from most discussions is the inevitability of failure of those controls over time. Four alternative approaches are considered for exercise of community control: (1) leaseholds by new occupants/owners; (2) community 'shares' in development and gains; (3) social housing trusts as owner-operators of community-owned lands; and (4) transfer of 'risk ownership' to give a community the resources to remediate after failures. The study finds that only the first three approaches can make cost-effective contributions to successful regeneration, while the fourth is inevitably cost-inefficient.