161 and other munitions and heavy industrial activities, which has left a lot of the city undevelopable.” In fact, Fulda notes that roughly 30 percent of the city’s land parcels are vacant or underused. City planners and developers are working to understand the opportunity cost of so-called brownfield redevelopment sites, guided by a map-based Brownfields Inventory Site Selector tool, which is loaded with all relevant data. Developers at MetroCOG created the tool to fill in knowledge gaps, using GIS technology. City planners use the tool to visualize, analyze, and prioritize sites based on factors such as contamination levels, connectivity to freight and transit hubs, and climate resilience. “We’re trying to eliminate as many impedances as possible,” said Patrick Carleton, deputy director at MetroCOG. “Getting information out there and accessible makes an easier path forward for redevelopment.” Reconnecting along the Northeast Corridor Brownfield redevelopment provides a potential win-win situation for municipalities both by addressing environmental contamination and generating new businesses and jobs that produce tax revenue. And removing brownfields provides a psychological value—to show a city isn’t mired in its past. MetroCOG has a history of transforming brownfield sites, having secured grants from the US EPA and state agencies for both assessment and remediation for many sites in the region. The scale of remediation varies dramatically across different properties. Some just need removal of contaminated soils or building asbestos. Other sites are far more complex, with different industries on the same property over the course of 100 years, and require millions of dollars to fully remediate all sorts of legacy contaminants. — Matt Fulda, executive director at MetroCOG Smart Planning With success visualizing in 3D, MetroCOG invested in ArcGIS Urban to create such projects as this virtual reality model of a village district on a commercial corridor in the region. The first step involves inventorying sites. So MetroCOG staff members started by gathering background details and adding those to the inventory map. They scanned documents from municipal and state records pertaining to past facilities that occupied each site, with information such as type of contaminants and likely location of hazardous materials. The MetroCOG team then conducted spatial analysis to determine where remediation work would have the most impact across the region. The team’s work factored in environmental justice issues as residents around some sites experience persistent poverty and disparities in education and health. “We’ve tried to target specific corridors in Bridgeport and Stratford, the two most urbanized and disadvantaged communities in our region, and with the most problematic sites,” Carleton said. Next, MetroCOG hired environmental remediation experts to sample and analyze the soil, groundwater, and
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