Turning Failed Commercial Properties into Parks

In the language of urbanism, “greenfields” usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. “Brownfields” are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. “Greyfields” — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers. Recently another such locution was coined: “redfields,” as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate.

Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other distressed, outmoded or undesirable built places: failed office and apartment complexes, vacant retail strips and big-box stores, newly platted subdivisions that died aborning in the crash.

Now comes “Redfields to Greenfields,” a promising initiative aimed at reducing the huge supply of stricken commercial properties while simultaneously revitalizing the areas around them. (It’s a catchy title, if imprecise because it’s about re-establishing greenfields within developed areas, not about doing anything to natural or agricultural acreage at the urban margins.) The plan, in essence, is this: Determine where defunct properties might fit a metropolitan green-space strategy; acquire and clear them; then make them into parks and conservation areas, some permanent and some only land-banked until the market wants them again.

While it addresses the long-term challenges of greening cities and reversing sprawl, this idea is a response to immediate dilemmas: the oversupply, devaluation and abandonment of commercial real estate; the destabilization of banks by mounting commercial mortgage defaults; and persistent unemployment. “Regional planning efforts look at 20 years out, 50 years out, 100 years. But we need something now,” says Kevin Caravati, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. With support from the City Parks Alliance, a national advocacy group of parks professionals, conservancies and citizen groups, the institute developed an analytic methodology, focusing initially on metropolitan Atlanta.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business-economics/turning-failed-commercial-properties-into-parks-26410/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DailyGoodNews+%28Ode+Magazine+-+And+now+for+the+good+news%29

good ideas... Humans need green spaces and this is a great opportunity to provide more... (although my vision is one of more urban farming - food production must be re-examined in the U.S. and I don't think it is healthy to continue dependence on large agribusiness).

We are a narrow-minded lot, we people of the United States and the concern for tax revenue is difficult for some to overcome. I believe communities must think outside the box, get very creative, if we are to become healthy again.

"I believe communities must think outside the box, get very creative, if we are to become healthy again."

I say that all the time -- that we need to think WAY outside the box, and support those who are doing so. People are mired in evaluating history and previous cycles of decline, and while I absolutely believe we must learn from history, we also must be open to creating entirely new ways of doing things -- ways that have never been implemented -- and expanding our comprehension into new realms.

:hi:

and potential communities into vacant lots.

I'm not a tax attorney but I'm reasonably sure that the reason that there are so many empty storefronts around here is because the tax structure is such that if the developers can't get what they want for a property rent (i.e., the market has forced the rental value of a property down below a certain level) they make more money by leaving it vacant and taking the write off on the taxes. It's cheaper, for example, for them to let an entire building stand empty for three years than to rent it to me for $500 a month.

Yet another instance of "welfare for the rich."

I'm a social worker who works with the homeless. I'd like to open an office but everything around here is priced out of my reach, despite the fact that many of the properties that would work perfectly for me have been vacant for over three years. They've jiggered the tax structure such that they don't have to rent at the market rate - they get to artificially hike the market rate up.

It would be acceptable except these are the same people that continually put free market idealists into political office and talk about relying on "the invisible hand of the market."

that the need for shelter is dire, and why not use existing structures (foreclosed, abandoned, etc.) to create affordable housing and shelter.

There must be a balance between green spaces and shelter. Converting existing structures and eco-retrofitting them seems, to me, to be a great way of creating jobs across the country.

But, I hear you. There is so much red tape -- in place to benefit the wealthy and punish those who aren't -- that what makes sense and what is needed is often the last thing that is even considered.

Who picks up the tab?

K&R

People could certainly walk under wind turbines or solar panels like we walk beneath electric and telephone wires now. It wouldn't necessarily diminish the use of open space but would double the land's use.