Project Description
Milwaukee’s Brownfields: Redevelopment and Environmental Equity?
Funding Agency: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School Research Committee Award.
Project goals: (a) To examine whether there are environmental equity issues associated with the redevelopment of brownfields that have been supported by public funds in Milwaukee (using Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping analysis based on federal, state, and local brownfields lists, and US Census Bureau and other public geo-referenced socioeconomic and related data); (b) To research private-sector developer experiences concerning brownfield redevelopment in Milwaukee (based on developer interviews).
The specific objectives of this research are:
- To systematically evaluate the experience of those private-sector developers who have redeveloped brownfields using public funds, in terms of which sites were selected, why, the actual obstacles encountered, and the mechanisms for overcoming them;
- To determine whether the spatial distribution of redeveloped brownfields highlights problems of environmental inequity, in terms of the extent to which redevelopment supported by public funds has/has not occurred in the most distressed neighborhoods;
- To ascertain the insights of private developers about the potential for redevelopment of the less marketable brownfields in the most distressed neighborhoods.