Urban Planning
N Assisting Cities to Reap Value From Brownfields the Market Spurns Above/left: Stephen Marks, the town administrator for Kearny, N.J., and Colette Santasieri, executive director of the NJ Brownfields Assistance Center @ NJIT, take stock of an abandoned gas station that abuts a public walkway on a bank of the Passaic River. Above/right: Sean Vroom, Colette Santasieri and Melissa Dulinski of the state-funded NJ Brownfields Assistance Center @ NJIT help municipalities such as Newark with redevelopment strategies by establishing both larger goals and specific community needs and then finding the best properties to realize them from brownfield inventories they have created. Photos: Pete Labrozzi
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NJIT Research Magazine 2021
ewark Planning Officer Christopher A. Watson needs an inventory of every brownfield in the city. It is a tall order, considering there are hundreds of these parcels, some contaminated, that were abandoned when sheet iron, patent leather and electrical instrument manufacturers departed this former industrial powerhouse. With help from the NJ Brownfields Assistance Center @ NJIT, however, he is confident he will get there, while also identifying the best properties to market for redevelopment to advance Newark’s larger development goals. The center’s executive director, Colette Santasieri, starts with a series of questions about municipal priorities: Which wards lack affordable housing and where are their brownfields located? Is there a section that needs light industry to support Port Newark? The team’s next step is to examine nearby brownfields and rank their prospects for remediation and redevelopment. As Watson eyes areas like the East Ward and the North Ward in particular, he is thinking about “how we can be more inclusive in our development, because a lot of these sites are not downtown. They’re in our neighborhoods, right? And if we want to rethink our neighborhoods in their next physical iteration, then we need to bring back the assets into the fold.” Principally, the center helps municipalities develop brownfield strategies by establishing larger goals and then
finding the best properties to realize them. In addition, its administrators and project managers help municipalities assess individual properties, explaining the nitty-gritty of grant applications and how to navigate New Jersey’s regulatory process and interpret technical reports on contamination. The center’s website offers a primer on brownfields, starting with its definition (“properties that are abandoned or underutilized because of either real or perceived contamination”) and drilling down to sources of funding and the basics of planning, engaging communities, assessing properties and cleaning them up. Funded by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), the center launched in early 2020 as a free resource for county and municipal governments. Its staff of four brings private- and public-sector experience in environmental planning, civil engineering and environmental remediation, honed in part from guiding federally funded brownfield projects on the East Coast via a sister organization, Technical Assistance to Brownfield Communities. NJEDA sees the center as a valuable ally to municipalities that provides customized, one-on-one support and complements state programs for remediating and redeveloping brownfields. The center is working with the Town of Kearny as it develops a new master plan, including identifying known and suspected contaminated sites and recommending grants to acquire and remediate them. “The community has identified, for example, the former Skinner Brothers service station on Passaic Avenue as a blighted property and potentially unsafe structure, and requested that the town demolish the building and turn the site into green space,” notes Stephen Marks, the town’s administrator. “This local capacity-building is crucial to achieving long-term successful brownfields remediation that not only cleans up contaminated properties, but also advances other important environmental justice goals and helps to strengthen the local community and economy,” says Elizabeth Limbrick, senior brownfields adviser for policy and communications at NJEDA. “This is particularly important as we move toward recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has devastated communities across New Jersey with disproportionate impacts on historically marginalized communities.” Indeed, cities like Newark and Trenton generally face
Downsizing the McMansion
Maurie Cohen Photo: Maurie Cohen and istock/ architetta
more challenges than suburban communities in attracting developers to transform brownfields. That said, they typically offer easy access to public transportation and other infrastructure that is patchy in the suburbs. And if cities can at least identify the contaminants in well-situated brownfields — there are grants for this — they can reduce the cost and risk for developers. “The one thing that every one of them has said is, ‘If you can reduce my risk, that makes the site more attractive,’” says Santasieri, who includes developers in the webinars and workshops she organizes for municipal leaders. She is expanding the center’s outreach to developers, and more broadly, the private sector. By creating a two-semester, experiential learning course on brownfields recovery, she will harness the talents of NJIT students. During the summer, her staff created a series of infographics for the center’s website that explain environmental assessment and cleanup in a digestible way. For Watson, the center represents a valuable partnership with the university where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in urban systems and urban environment. Santasieri is a graduate of the same program and now they are collaborating to spark investment in Newark. “I appreciate the level of involvement and the level of skill that is being offered to us,” he adds. “When you get these types of services and they’re free and they have the possibility of even added value through money — through grants and all those things — it’s always a win-win situation.”
What might homes of the future look like if countries were really committed to global calls for sustainability? Much wider adoption of smart design features and renewable energy for low- to zero-carbon homes is one place to start. The United Nations estimates households consume 29% of global energy and consequently contribute up to 21% of carbon dioxide emissions. MAURIE COHEN, a professor of humanities and member of the international sustainability organization, FutureEarth, also makes the case for transitioning away from the large, single-family homes that typify suburban sprawl. “The notion of ‘bigger is better’ will need to be supplanted by the question of ‘how much is enough?’” he posits. Standardized building codes that define minimally “sufficient” home size (150 square feet for an individual and 450 square feet for a four-person household), he notes, could be expanded to include maximum sufficiency limits. Taking into account sustainability and equity considerations, he estimates those limits could be downsized to 215 square feet and approximately 860 square feet, respectively. By contrast, the average home size in the U.S. today is 1,901 square feet. In a recent article in the journal, Housing, Theory & Society, Cohen points to recent housing innovations that could serve as models for the efficient use of space: the tiny-house movement; the construction of accessory dwelling units on the West Coast; microapartments in New York City and San Francisco; the emergence of co-living/co-working facilities in Europe; and the niche market for substantially smaller units in the Nordic countries. Since the 1950s, home size in many wealthy countries has been increasing while household size has been declining. The average size of a newly built single-family home in the U.S. has nearly tripled from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,740 square feet in 2015. Meanwhile, the average number of people per household has decreased by 24%, from 3.3 persons to 2.52. If architects and the building industry followed the numbers and adopted sufficiency limits, the average floor space per person would need to be reduced from 754 square feet to 215 square feet, “which perhaps surprisingly, is roughly comparable to the amount of space available during the baby boom of the 1950s,” Cohen notes.
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