Greening Brownfields
By one estimate, Philadelphia has as many as 2,000 abandoned polluted lots. These former commercial sites, or brownfields, are a tough challenge to urban redevelopment. WHYY's Mhari Saito spoke to a Kensington entrepreneur testing out a surprising business on land once called unsafe. ------ A company called Boyles Galvanizing once treated metals to resist rust at their Kensington factory on East Cumberland Street. Rumors about hazardous waste on the site circulated among neighbors for years, but it wasn't until 1993 that the federal Environmental Protection Agency found unsafe levels of lead and zinc in the soil. The EPA spent four years and nearly half a million dollars to clean up the property. Now, it's a commercial farm called Greensgrow. In a cylindrical plastic greenhouse, Mary Seton Corboy is growing a dozen tomato plants on red plastic, part of a test she is mimicking.
The main condition at Greensgrow is that nothing edible touches the ground. Tomatoes and flowers start life in bags. Spinach and herbs sprout in raised beds of soil on top of layers of plastic and concrete. And lettuce - hundreds of pounds of fancy mesclun leaves - are grown hydroponically in a maze of plastic gutters and then sold to Center City restaurants. Everything is regularly tested to make sure it's free of contaminants. "What we're trying to show is that by using hydroponics you can take land that's considered unusable and put it back to use for either horticulture or agriculture," Corboy says. What to do with polluted commercial sites or brownfields is a big problem for cities. John Edelstein manages brownfield development for the city Commerce Department. Edelstein says the city's nineteenth century history as an industrial power puts it in a unique position: There are thousands of empty factories on neighborhood corners. "When these factories became abandoned they created a vortex that sucked in the communities around them," Edelstein says. "When we are able to clean up these centers at the heart of these communities, it's like throwing a stone in pond with a ripple effect of revitalization."
"One of the big fears is the fear that should you get involved with a brownfield you are opening your checkbook for liability," Edelstein says. Under federal law, owners can be held responsible for pollutants left by previous businesses. To get around this at Greensgrow farm, the EPA signed an agreement with the community development corporation that owns the land promising not to sue. Corboy says she ended up here because there weren't many other choices. "Originally, the idea was to grow in the city and deliver fresh produce," Corboy says. "Then it came to looking around and seeing the land that was available and affordable had something wrong with it." Neither the city nor the state knows how many brownfields there are in Philadelphia. Patrick Starr directs the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and says this neighborhood between Girard and Lehigh Avenues east of Broad Street contains 600 contaminated sites. No one's counted how many brownfields there are in the rest of the city. Starr says the city needs to market the brownfields as assets, especially when the suburbs complain of overdevelopment and sprawl. "One of the issues in terms of the city is land assembly for redevelopment," Starr says. "The average size of a brownfield is still going to be larger than a rowhouse lot, so they can start with more land to begin with. It will facilitate redevelop by using brownfields."
Mary Seton Corboy says gardening at the neighborhood level can be a way to help fight blight. Corboy offers perennials to block captains at wholesale value to help them green their neighborhoods. "Gardening is something that can get under your skin," Corboy says. "It can be an inexpensive way to clean up a neighborhood." But Corboy says her first goal is to prove that selling lettuce and produce to fancy restaurants from her inner city farm can be profitable. If so, she says she'd love to see other farms like hers in other parts of the city.
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"In the Penn State experiment they assume you have a field," Corboy says with a laugh. "We don't have a field, we have bags. But I don't see any reason why we can't simulate the results of the experiment under our growing conditions."
Part of Edelstein's job is to convince developers to build on these properties. He coordinates state and federal programs to reassure buyers no one's going to sue them for the pollution left by earlier owners.
Right now, 20 million dollars are budgeted to knock down some of the city's 3,000 abandoned commercial buildings as part of Mayor John Street's long-awaited anti-blight plan. But there's no money for redeveloping any possible brownfields once the structures are gone. Instead,the city says it will aggressively pursue state funding to help clean up and develop these sites.