Vacant and underutilized properties dot cityscapes and towns across the Great Lakes region and across the globe. They can be a serious hindrance to economic growth, and lead to social and environmental inequity in communities. The redevelopment or reuse of these sites is often complicated by financial complexities or the potential presence of pollutants.
Additionally, many resource-constrained communities and local governments often struggle to bring brownfields and other vacant or underutilized properties back into productive reuse, as a significant amount of work and resources are necessary to assess, clean up, and market the blighted sites.
Delta’s Ben Shorofsky assesses a vacant property in Gary, IN.
To reduce this barrier, Delta developed the Brownfields Marketability Scoring Tool.
It’s an open-source, easy-to-use tool to help communities and local governments identify properties that may be easier to redevelop (from the perspective of the private market). It prompts users to look at factors like environmental conditions, ownership, and community characteristics. And because the tool also illuminates more challenging properties, users are better able to develop focused strategies to address these challenges and potentially improve the marketability of a site.
By pairing the relative marketability of a site with a community’s overall brownfields program goals and reuse goals for sites, the tool enables communities to prioritize those sites that have the greatest likelihood for successful redevelopment.
We presented this tool at the 2015 Brownfields Conference in Chicago.
Email Margaret Renas, mrenas@delta-institute.org, with questions about this tool or Delta’s community-focused brownfields redevelopment work.