Word: brownfields
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Providence was like pre-Buddy. At a reception, he beckons me to a plate-glass window on the 17th floor of the Biltmore Hotel, where he happens to live. "I love this view," he says, gesturing with a glass of '98 Louis Bernard Chateauneuf du Pape. "That was a brownfield," he says of the picturesque street being plied by a trolley. "I put the railroad tracks under the mall there," where a new hotel stands...
...American Airlines Center, which opened last week with a sellout concert by the Eagles, is the centerpiece of the 72-acre Victory project, one of the nation's largest and most successful cleanups of a "brownfield"--the Environmental Protection Agency's term for contaminated areas with the potential for reuse. Rising from the ashes of a 100-year-old city dump, a railroad maintenance facility, an aging power plant and a row of abandoned grain silos, the Victory project is a $1 billion development catering to road-weary Dallasites who want to live, work and play downtown...
...Victory is a model for brownfield development. What used to be an empty field has real potential to boost downtown Dallas," says local EPA boss Stan Hitt, whose offices overlook the arena site. Mayor Ron Kirk, who supported the project despite early opposition in town, is fairly beaming. "The manufacturers and polluters abandoned this 30 years ago, but we've cleaned it up and put it back on the tax rolls," he says. And Victory is just one big win for Dallas. Not counting that project, the city has leveraged $600,000 in EPA grants into $835 million in private...
Dallas isn't alone in recognizing that developers hungry for cheap industrial sites help keep dollars and jobs from fleeing to the suburbs. Environmentalists too are beginning to see brownfields' redevelopment as a way to preserve pristine spaces in the exurbs. Even the EPA, whose Superfund efforts in the 1980s caused many landlords to fence in and lock up sites, has loosened its regulatory oversight since 1995. While developers could technically still be held liable for past contamination, nonlitigation agreements between Washington and 16 states--including Texas--are a wink and a nod by the feds to encourage the cleanup...
...nation's largest brownfield project by far is Bethlehem Steel's $1.5 billion plan to convert its Pennsylvania home into a commercial and cultural site, including the Smithsonian's new National Museum of Industrial History. Denver's old Stapleton Airport, an 8-sq.-mi. brownfield, will be ripped up for homes and shops set amid waterways. In all, the EPA estimates there are 450,000 brownfields--and possibly a million--nationwide...