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6
Community Past, Present, and Futures
Pittsburgh' s economy has lately been benefiting from a great deal of brown-
field redevelopment. One can travel up and down the river and see new signs of
life where old steel mills once stood. A paradigm shift among regulators from
focusing on contamination to remediation to redevelopment has been proceed-
ing at such a rapid pace that the public might well ask if the quality of the
environment for the long term is at times being compromised for the sake of the
economy in the near term.
In some cases, however, environmental contamination has turned out to be
relatively modest, even though opponents of the development project fought it
on environmental grounds. This suggests a certain degree of chronic tension
between the public and developers that needs to be respected, and tapped, for the
common good.
Education and knowledge sharing avenues for communication are essen-
tial for trust and acceptance. This applies in both directions all stakeholders
have not always been represented at the table, yet they've been expected to live
with the consequences of the decisions. A related concern is that decision-making
groups not lose sight of old communities while building new communities it's
best to find ways to achieve integration and continuity between the two as brown-
fields are put back into productive use.
In addition to satisfying economic, environmental, and social concerns, it's
important that communities be conducive to individuals' good-health practices.
Redevelopment plans and land-use strategies must consciously incorporate fea-
tures for "active living" for example, by providing numerous opportunities for
exercise and an environment that's attractive for that purpose. The layout of
* This chapter was prepared from the transcript of the meeting by Steven J. Marcus as the rappor-
teur. The discussions were edited and organized around major themes to provide a more readable
summary and to eliminate duplication of topics.
36
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COMMUNITY—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
37
communities, especially created communities, should allow for a healthier
population.
A panel of speakers discussed strategies to secure active-living communities;
redevelop brownfields with quality environment, quality of life, sound engineer-
ing, and economic viability (and affordability) in mind; inspire regulators' efforts
to balance redevelopment and environmental-safety objectives; obtain environ-
mental justice (in essence, "ensure that the people who are most affected by a
problem are at the table"; and ensure people's comfort and safety in their own
homes.
"ACTIVE LIVING" IN WALKABLE COMMUNITIES
A strong relationship exists between physical activity (or the lack of it) and
the prevention (or development) of disease, according to Andrea Kriska, an asso-
ciate professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public
Health. Indeed, the 1996 Surgeon General's Report on Physical Activity and
Health concluded that "Regular physical activity that is performed on most days
of the week reduces the risk of developing or dying from some of the leading
causes of illness and death in the United States" for example, cardiovascular
disease, type II diabetes, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and cancer.
Thirty minutes a day of moderately intensive exercise such as walking-
can greatly impact on both physical and mental health. But the challenge, Kriska
noted, is how to get people to actually do those 30 minutes, how to put activity
into their day on a regular basis. The solution, she said, is "to take it to the
community to go into the environment, remove the barriers, and create the
opportunities for a person to be more active." Specifically, the public health
literature suggests things like "purposeful walking" "many individuals are not
going to get out there and just walk for the sake of walking. They want a reason
to get there," Kriska said. There need to be attractive places they wish to go to.
The actual number of places within walking distance of people's homes is
strongly related to how much walking they do. Likewise, the safety of the neigh-
borhood. One major reason why some parents keep their children in the home is
safety. If they're sitting in front of the TV, at least they're not out on the street,
vulnerable to crime, traffic, and infrastructure such as sidewalks in deterio-
rated and hazardous condition.
"The thing that put my field back 30 years," Kriska noted, "was [that mis-
guided notion of] 'no pain, no gain.' People don't do things if they're unpleasant.
Whether the sidewalks, the architecture, the green spaces are pleasant is very
important to walking and physical activity."
She cited the work of her doctoral student Wendy King, who investigated
walking habits of a cohort of postmenopausal women as functions of their neigh-
borhood environments. The results, some of which are shown in Figure 6-1,
indicate that the number of locations within walking distance from the home had
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38
ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
[:::1 Pedometer
(1 O*steps/day)
PI Walking (kcal/week)
~ Activity (kcal/week)
1 600
1 400
1 200
1 000
800
600
400
200
0 1 2+
# Locations within Walking
Distance
FIGURE 6-1 People who have more locations to walk to, walk more each week than
those who don't have locations within walking distance. SOURCE: King, et al. In press.
Reprinted with permission.
a significant impact on physical activity levels. "The more locations there are for
you to walk to," Kriska observed, "the more you will walk." Likewise the neigh-
borhood rating, as shown in Figure 6-2 "the better you rate your neighbor-
hood, the more you are going to be getting out there and walking." In other
words, she concluded, "the convenience of locations and quality of the neighbor-
hood surroundings will impact physical activity." This relationship has not been
lost on community leaders, and many are now actively trying to make their
neighborhoods, towns, and cities more walkable.
REDEVELOPING BROWNFIELDS: DEVELOPER
Because many home buyers now demand planned, pedestrian-oriented com-
munities with a great deal of open space, they're receptive to redeveloped brown-
field sites that offer these attributes, according to Mark C. Schneider, president
of the Rubinoff Company. On this issue, "the market is out in front of us devel-
opers and public health officials. Some 35 percent of the new-housing market
would live in communities like this, which makes these sites worth pursuing."
Schneider is managing general partner of Summerset at Frick Park a
redeveloped slag site in Pittsburgh previously called Nine Mile Run and he
noted the irony that such former industrial locations, perennially thought to
present serious environmental problems, can actually offer healthful, high-quality
living for their residents or users. For one thing, a 230-acre parcel like Nine Mile
Run, not often found in most cities, presents intriguing possibilities. For another,
the problems for the developer at that specific site "were not environmental,"
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COMMUNITY—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
P=.0008
P=.0077
P=.001 6
Pedometer 200
We ing ( Cal eek) Boo
Activity (kcal/week) 400
poor fair good excellent
Neighborhood Rating
39
FIGURE 6-2 Individuals who rate their neighborhood good or excellent walk more than
those who rate their neighborhood as poor. SOURCE: King et al. In press. Reprinted with
. .
permlsslon.
Schneider maintained. "They were engineering, and continue to be engineering."
Because slag was dumped at a steep slope, the company has had to regrade to
ensure stable hillsides, vegetation growth, and sustainability.
Nevertheless, "when you are working on a brownfield," he emphasized,
"the environmental issue can become 'a wedge issue and a scare tactic' for
people attempting to stop the project." Ultimately, they couldn't stop it, though
they did substantially increase the amount of money that had to be spent and the
time it took to get the site entitled. "We spent half a million dollars doing air
monitoring, basically demonstrating that there was no problem with the grading
of the slag or the moving of the slag," Schneider said.
Environmental quality, fundamentally, is a legitimate concern, and develop-
ers and public regulators must of course be careful that a project is safe. But to
succeed, whether financially or environmentally, developers also need certainty
and predictability. Schneider cited multiple levels of uncoordinated, redundant
review for Summerset at Frick Park that he alleged made the project far more
complex than it needed to be: "We had our own environmental experts. Our
lenders had their own environmental experts. We had DEP (the Pennsylvania
Department of Environmental Protection) opining on this for Act II of the con-
sent order. URA (the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh), which was
the landowner, had its own consultants. The Allegheny County Health Depart-
ment reviewed this. The state health department was brought in by ATSDR (the
U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registries) because EPA (the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) got a complaint from somebody who
wanted to stop the project. We had seven ATSDR public health advisories, and
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40
ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
also the URA ended up paying for a separate consultant to work with the com-
munity group to overview all this work."
In place of such an ad hoc, seemingly open-ended procedure, he suggested,
should be leadership, partnership, and clear policies with agreed-upon and un-
ambiguous rules by which developer, regulator, and the public can make their
respective contributions thoroughly, yet fairly to livable, health-promoting
communities.
REDEVELOPING BROWNFIELDS: REGULATOR
The terms "Superfund site" and "brownfield" may sometimes appear synony-
mous, but the ATSDR makes an important operational distinction. According to
Henry Falk, assistant administrator of ATSDR, the Superfund program focuses
on hazardous-waste contamination and how sites can be remediated, while the
brownfields program deals largely with moving sites toward redevelopment, or
redeveloping sites that were contaminated in one way or another but not to a
degree that they'd be considered Superfund sites.
The Superfund program created by the Comprehensive Environmental
Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, generally referred to as the
"Superfund law" was prompted by the events at Love Canal. Putting first things
first, the law addressed environmental issues such as criteria for prioritizing
sites, looking especially at populations at risk. Next, it addressed the potential
for contamination of drinking water, for direct human contact, and for destruc-
tion of sensitive ecosystems.
Thus, ATSDR, an agency that also was created by the Superfund law, does
environmental public health evaluations, exposure assessments, health investiga-
tions, and toxicology profiles to evaluate the health aspects of Superfund sites in
a very systematic way. It also issues public health advisories when substances
from the site are present at levels that may threaten human health.
Occasionally, these threats prove highly significant. In Libby, Montana,
which used to host the country's largest vermiculite mine, the agency examined
7,300 people, almost 20 percent of whom had chest X rays showing pleural
abnormalities related to asbestos (the mined vermiculite had contained a certain
amount of tremolite asbestos). Of the former W.R. Grace workers who ran the
mine in its final decades and participated in the examinations, 51 percent showed
pleural abnormalities. Moreover, even the people who didn't have abnormalities
are at risk of developing them in years to come.
Such sites are under prolonged remediation, of course. But some Superfund
sites do get redeveloped. The Rocky Mountain Arsenal is now a very enchanting
nature preserve, Falk observed. The Presidio of San Francisco has been the site
of a "Star Wars" movie studio, and the Memphis Defense Depot is multiuse
commercial region. So it does happen, but it takes a very long time, and in any
case redevelopment has not been the focus of the Superfund program.
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COMMUNITY—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
41
By contrast, numerous brownfield sites do get redeveloped, often with
ATSDR's assistance. In 2002, some 428 of them (former industrial, military, or
public-facility sites, for the most part) were cited in business journals and news-
papers as redevelopments completed or in progress. The most common type is
called "mixed use" combining office, retail, and residential. Other redevelop-
ments are cultural, recreational, or even industrial, though roughly 80 percent or
more of these sites do not go back into any type of industrial use.
The legislation that relates to brownfields is quite different from that of
Superfund, Falk observed. The EPA Brownfields Program, very heavily focused
on redevelopment, provides states and local areas with help in assessing specific
sites and evaluating the viability of proposed uses there. Summary descriptions
of the program in fact convey the number of property assessments, how much
redevelopment they have leveraged, and how many jobs they've created. Spe-
cifically, EPA maintains a revolving loan fund and provides "smart growth"
grants, "blighted community" grants, and job-training grants, among other things.
A prominent local example of a redeveloped brownfield site is the above-
mentioned Nine Mile Run slag site, the subject of numerous health consultations
by the Pennsylvania Department of Health over the years, with assistance from
ATSDR (see Figure 6-3~.
A variety of health problems had to be dealt with at this former site of steel-
related slag, Falk said. They included potential for exposure to manganese and
other metals in soil; grading, sloping, and physical hazards; CO2 venting; and the
suppression of airborne particulates and dust during construction.
But the result of redeveloping this very large site was a community of
hundreds of homes of different scales and types.
Not all brownfield redevelopments have happy endings. After condominiums
were built on the Grant Street site in Hoboken, New Jersey a building once
used for the production of electric vapor lamps residents started seeing drops
of mercury on their oven ranges and tabletops. Subsequent medical investiga-
tions found high levels of mercury in their bodies, which led to a public health
advisory and medical intervention for residents provided by Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School. They had to be permanently relocated, as the building
was declared uncleanable and therefore unfit for habitation.
Practices for brownfield environmental evaluation, including sensitive ana-
lytic methods, more and better sampling (including all contaminants of concern),
and thorough consideration of the historical uses of the property, have improved
since the Grant Street episode. Nevertheless, "as we work with redeveloping
brownfields," Falk said, "one needs to retain a healthy measure of inquiry to
focus on what these properties have been used for and on what can be done for
them in the future."
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42
ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
FIGURE 6-3 Through active monitoring, numerous brownfield sites can be redeveloped.
Often they are developed into mixed uses combining office, retail, and residential.
SOURCE: ATSDR (brownfield site); Summerset Land Development Associates (devel-
oped site). Reprinted with permission.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
According to EPA, "Environmental justice is achieved when everyone,
regardless of race, culture, or income, enjoys the same degree of protection from
environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making
process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work."
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COMMUNITY—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
43
While Leon Haynes, executive director of Hosanna House, endorsed this
definition, he stressed an essential prerequisite. "Our success in addressing envi-
ronmental justice depends on our ability to collaborate with all stakeholders," he
said. "We have got to make sure that the people who are most affected by a
problem are at the table. Anything less than that is not justice." Moreover, Haynes
added, "we must acknowledge that there is no one answer in solving environmental-
justice problems. We must consider a holistic approach that includes every
sector."
He cited the federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice,
and particularly its Revitalization Demonstration Projects in some 15 different
communities. The goal of these projects is to improve the quality of life of
minority and low-income people who suffer disproportionate environmental
impacts and who traditionally have had limited access to environmental services.
The program recognizes that many environmental issues cannot be adequately
addressed without the combined resources of federal, state, and local govern-
ment, along with capacity building at the community level, Haynes said. In that
way, long-term solutions can be developed through a bottom-up approach that
"involves community folks in making good decisions."
An example of such a process, he suggested, is his own Hosanna House, a
nonprofit that took over an abandoned 1916-vintage school building rife with
environmental problems such as lead and asbestos. "We had to educate our-
selves on what it means to remove or encapsulate. But we pressed on. We got
information. We gathered people to work with us in order to do that. And today
we have renovated 126,000 square feet of facility that is providing services to
over 17,000 people. These are some of the things that I think the community can
do if we give it a chance."
Another example, pending in the East End of Pittsburgh, is toxic fumes from
the buses that the residents of this high-density community depend on to go to
work. These people need to be educated to look at bus transportation from an
environmental viewpoint, Haynes said. And they should be empowered with
information on alternatives to diesel-fueled buses e.g., natural-gas buses or
electric buses.
"My concerns," he said, "are with the things that affect what I think my
community folks would see and pay more attention to if they had more informa-
tion things like lead poisoning, asbestos, and even violence among young
African-American males. These, along with undesirable land use, lack of green
space, and toxins from automobiles, are environmental injustices" that are not
dealt with properly, in large part because of inadequate information.
We thus need "to take the time to make sure that they have the information
necessary in front of them to make the best decisions for themselves and
their families," Haynes said. "I don't think we've done a good enough job on
that. We also need to understand that people don't care how much we know until
they know how much we care."
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ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
TOWARD HEALTHY HOMES
"Our homes should be our safe places the places where our children are
tucked in at night, but we know that this is not always the case," said Samantha
Roth, executive director of Healthy Home Resources. "Our homes may be dan-
gerous, mysterious places that can cause multiple problems, especially for young
children who are unwittingly exposed to in-home environmental hazards."
For example, residents can come into contact with lead via lead-paint dust
and lead dust as well as pesticides, molds, and various solvents. Among the
more vulnerable i.e., the youngest occupants some of these agents are known
to cause physical and learning disabilities, developmental delays in fine and
gross motor skills, and recent research by Dr. Herbert Needleman from the
University of Pittsburgh suggests that with even low levels of lead exposure, our
children may develop behavioral issues such as ADHD (attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder) and oppositional defiance disorder
Living in a healthy home is obviously a desirable goal. But barriers often
prevent its realization.
· General lack of knowledge. Shelter, safe neighborhoods, and home
ownership are justly each resident's top priority. But fully understanding
the structural issues of a home, the materials used within it, and a home's
potential impact on our health has not yet risen to the top of our minds-
even as a secondary priority. Research findings are starting to proliferate,
but they must be put into language that can commonly be understood and
supported by state and federal housing inspection regulations.
· Low home-ownership rates. People are empowered to make changes by
their ability to control the environment around them as well as having
good information. If they are renters, that ability is compromised because
they can't readily contract services to have work done in their home.
Oftentimes they find themselves in an adversarial relationship with their
landlord if such requests are made.
· Inaccessibility to services and products. The cost of remediation is high.
Even with the knowledge of potentially hazardous conditions in their
homes, low-income homeowners find maintenance and remediation cost-
prohibitive. Lead abatement as well as mold mitigation can exceed
$10,000 per unit.
· Inadequate regulatory and enforcement policies and data collection sys-
tems. This may be seen at the local, state, and federal departments of
environment, public health, housing and urban development, and health
and human services the very systems that we rely upon to provide the
general public with accurate and timely information. For example, 90
percent of Pittsburgh's housing stock was built prior to 1978, the year in
which lead paint was banned. Thus, lead paint may be present in 90
percent of our city's homes. Even though the State of Pennsylvania man-
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COMMUNITY—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
45
dates that all Medicaid children be screened for lead poisoning at 12 and
24 months of age as part of the EPDST [Early and Periodic Screening,
Diagnosis, and Treatment program], "the percentage of Medicaid children
being screened in Allegheny County is abysmal," Roth said. According
to the Allegheny County Health Department, only 6 percent of Medicaid
children were screened in 1999 and screening rates continue to fall each
year. "This is only one cross-section of our child population. How can we
know the extent of the problem and aptly make choices about program-
ming if the data are not readily available nor being collected?" "In the
absence of good local data, we are gravely concerned that lead poisoning
prevention resources will diminish.
These barriers may be lower with the help of "community action models"
that reflect creative program design and multiple approaches. Three program-
matic models, two of them currently focused on lead and the third on multiple
in-home environmental issues, are:
.
.
Lead Safe Pittsburgh, recognized by the Alliance to End Childhood Lead
Poisoning as an excellent example of community collaboration, is a coali-
tion of more than 65 institutional and community-based stakeholders in
southwestern Pennsylvania. It is addressing the systemic barriers in
place policy and data systems as well as physician practice that allow
lead exposure in the home to go undetected.
· CLEARCorps, The Community Lead Education and Reduction Corps is a
national AmeriCorps program. It works within communities to educate
residents, in part by nurturing local champions and neighborhood stew-
ards, on the prevention of lead poisoning. "Our CLEARCorps program is
currently focusing its educational efforts in partnership with local early
childhood development centers and parents," said Roth, "in an effort to
express a simple concept: with engaged educators and parents who under-
stand the link between health and a child's ability to learn, and a home
free of developmentally devastating hazards, our children have a better
chance of success in life."
The American Respiratory Alliance of southwestern Pennsylvania is part-
nering for the first time ever with an environmental organization in an
effort to answer the following questions: (1) What is the local prevalence
of environmental irritants or poor indoor air quality in the homes of asth-
matic children and does this prevalence align with national findings?
(2) What would it cost, on average, to remediate affected homes and are
there creative means to finance these costs? (3) Can varying degrees of
remediation and in-home environmental education for parents of children
with asthma reduce school absenteeism and health care expenditures
(such as the cost of frequent emergency room visits)?
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ENSURING ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IN POSTINDUSTRIAL CITIES
"This approach is exciting because it's expanding the traditional medical
management approach of asthma into comprehensive approach that includes an
environmental perspective of the home," Roth said.
Still, she cited areas for further expansion, such as the advocacy of health
standards both for the home itself and the products that enter it, and the mobiliza-
tion of already-served families to help form parent-action groups and communi-
cate the problem (and solutions) to the public.
"Sustained change in this area," Roth emphasized, "really does mean work-
ing along side the community and its residents to address these issues and help
everyone understand that the healthiness of our homes does impact our health,
especially that of our children."
Representative terms from entire chapter:
ensuring environmental
