In booming cities, old industrial sites, railyards, shipyards and decommissioned military bases are frequently among the last large empty spaces ripe for infill. The communities near these sites are often low-income. Like Bayview, many have weathered the economic and environmental blows of declining industries and their toxic legacies. Now, they find themselves caught between hope for much-needed investment and fear of the change it might bring. “One of the complaints about the (smart growth) movement has been, ‘It’s always upscale, it’s expensive, it drives people out,’ ” says John Frece, the director of the EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities. To prevent displacement, federal funding for smart-growth projects through the Partnership includes requirements for affordable housing, job-training programs and community engagement in the planning process. The administration’s goal, Frece says, is to make sure communities aren’t “penalized just because their environmental problems get cleaned up.” Accomplishing that, though, isn’t easy. Says Malo Hutson, assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley: “You would get the Nobel Prize in Economics — or Peace — if you could figure out a way to keep the community that existed before the redevelopment project came along.
