American Planning Association Spotlights MFA Project

Thanks to the American Planning Association (APA) and author Katharine Logan, LEED AP, we are proud that our work in Spokane’s 500-acre Hillyard industrial district is one of three examples featured in the February 2017 Planning magazine article titled “Communities Thrive on Clean Dirt:  A new paradigm in brownfield remediation is revitalizing communities.”

In the 1950s, the Hillyard railroad terminal brought around 2,400 freight trains through Spokane, Washington. Today, more than 30 years after the rail yard was decommissioned, planners are looking to bring industry back to the community, with help from an EPA Area Wide Planning grant to fund the planning work and a Community Wide Assessment grant to inventory the contamination.

The Yard, as the industrial area is known, is also Washington’s first Redevelopment Opportunity Zone, a designation available to areas in which at least 50 percent of properties are brownfields, which makes it eligible for additional state resources and redevelopment tools, such as expedited purchaser liability protection.

Even at this early stage, the municipality is seeing interest from the development community, with some property owners using the historical data from the inventory in their preliminary review of options for their sites.

Click below to read the full article: