EPA plans funding for remediation sites
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to offer $235 million in new grants to redevelop contaminated sites across the country known as brownfields, the latest allotment from $1.5 billion allocated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Though this year's funds have not yet been targeted, Texas has received more than $7.6 million from the federal Brownfields Program in the last two funding cycles. The funding stream has been around since 1995, and EPA representatives said yearly investments have increased fourfold since the 2021 law was passed.
A spokesperson from EPA Region 6, which covers Texas and neighboring states, said Houston has received $500,000 from the program since the Infrastructure
Bill became law.
The previous distributions included funds to augment the city’s ongoing brownfields recovery efforts, identifying five priority sites across Fifth Ward, Denver Harbor and Sunnyside. Two of those were described as potential candidates for health clinics, one for a co-op grocery store, one for a stretch of recreational trails along Buffalo Bayou and one for the restoration of a historic community landmark.
The three-year grant period is ongoing, and city officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its progress.
Efforts to redevelop urban brownfields, which are often thick with toxic contamination, face numerous challenges. Still, redevelopment advocates such as Danielle Getsinger of local nonprofit Community Lattice note that when left untested and unmitigated, this urban contamination often negatively impacts surrounding residents and properties.
“Brownfields is not a dirty word, it’s an opportunity,” Getsinger said. “What the brownfields practitioners in Houston are trying to do is to position communities to reclaim their land that has been abandoned, that has been contributing to the compounding disparities that are in neighborhoods like Fifth Ward, like Sunnyside.”
Still, community concerns over prior contamination and the cleanup itself can make the process lengthy, and at times contentious. An ongoing brownfields redevelopment project, a solar farm which has long been planned to cover a city dump in Sunnyside, has stirred both anticipation and concern from local residents over the years.
The redevelopment of Houston’s
contaminated properties does not always mean a change of use, however: as with one of the properties mentioned in the city’s last EPA grant, it can also focus on the preservation of a
historically significant building or site so that neighborhood residents can begin using it safely.
Applications for the latest round of federal grant funding will be due Nov. 13.