Cleaning Up Brownfield Sites Benefits Environment, Nearby Property Values

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Laura Taylor, an NC State professor of agricultural and resource economics who directs the university’s Center for Environmental and Resource Economic Policy, and was first published on the London School of Economics United States Policy and Politics blog. It is based on ‘Disentangling property value impacts of environmental contamination from locally undesirable land uses: Implications for measuring post-cleanup stigma’ in the Journal of Urban Economics.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates over 450,000 properties are environmentally contaminated to such a degree that reuse or redevelopment of the property is likely to be hindered. Although the vast majority of these so-called “brownfields” are privately owned commercial and industrial properties, cleanup costs are often borne partially or wholly by the public sector.

虽然不可能评估清理国家的受污染场地的总成本，但它可以说，鉴于问题的范围，该成本可能是巨大的。在美国环保署的国家优先级列表中列出了超过1,000个危险废物地点的引人注目的例子 - 全国最严重受污染的地点的登记处。Recent estimatesof cleanup activities by the EPA at 36 of these sites alone will cost more than $4 billion. While the EPA attempts to recover costs from responsible parties, onlypartial cost recoveryhas been possible historically. Given the enormity of these costs, a natural question to ask, especially when public expenditures support cleanup, is do the benefits of cleanup outweigh the costs?

To partially answer this question, the EPA and state agencies charged with cleanup of hazardous sites often seek to measure one potentially large benefit of cleanup: the increase in property values around a site that are possible once it has been remediated through removal of the environmental contaminates. Many studies have shown that hazardous waste sitesnegatively impact靠近该网站的住宅属性，有时相对于可比家庭将财产价值减少超过10％。逻辑建议，一旦一个网站已经清理，附近的住房价值应该反弹。但是，证据并不总是如此。一些研究表明，在遗址修复后，财产价值仅部分反弹，表明长期stigmatizationof neighborhoods is possible from past environmental contamination.

我的共同作者，Daniel Phaneuf和刘向平，我通过收集有关所有商业和工业物业的信息（我只需称之为“商业物业”）在明尼阿波利斯和圣保罗，明尼苏达州的双城市，审查了耻辱问题。我们在该地区收集了地点信息和环境状况，以超过8,000个商业地产，并将其与超过150,000多家住宅家庭的销售数据相匹配。

Using homes that are not near any type of commercial property as our benchmark, we find that homes close to a contaminated commercial site sell for approximately 8 percent less than benchmark homes. However, we believe part of this negative impact is likely due to the fact that the neighbor is a commercial property and not the environmental contamination per se. This is because we also find that homes near clean commercial properties (those that have never had any known environmental contamination) also sell for a discount compared to the benchmark homes, but only by an average of 2 to 3 percent. Together, these results imply that environmental contamination has a significant additional negative influence on nearby residential property values beyond those that are associated with clean commercial properties.

好消息是，我们还发现，一旦从网站上拆除危险废物，减少了与靠近网站的折扣减少。在研究期间，我们样本中大约64％的危险部位进行了补救。我们发现，销售价格围绕围绕所讨论的地点反弹，以至于它们最终没有与清洁商业地产的销售价格不同。换句话说，我们找不到任何证据，因为在遗址修复后，家庭因在先前污染的地方而受到“耻辱”。

What do these results mean for policy makers seeking to measure the benefits and costs of proposed hazardous waste cleanups involving public funds? The good news is that our work suggests that any negative impacts from a contaminated site are likely to be removed by cleanup. However, our results also imply a note of caution is in order. It is not sufficient to just measure the housing value discounts associated with a particular site and assume this amount can be recovered if the site is remediated. We need to make sure we determine how the post-cleanup land-use of the site affects property values. Assuming post-cleanup land use is the same as pre-cleanup, then the negative effects of a commercial neighbor must be incorporated into the analysis so that the benefits of cleanup are not overstated.