What is Hartford doing about its brownfields?
Hartford is working to clean up its brownfields, protecting the environment and safeguarding public health, and return them to economically productive uses. Through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative, the city and the EPA are working to prevent, assess, safely clean up, and sustainably reuse brownfields. The city’s goal was to attract manufacturing and commercial industries to brownfield sites. In 1997 the EPA selected Hartford as a National Brownfields Assessment Pilot and awarded the city $200,000. The pilot project targeted blighted and deteriorated sites in three Hartford neighborhoods-Sheldon/Charter Oak, Upper Albany, and Clay Arsenal-areas where the EPA determined that perceptions of environmental contamination had impeded economic development. Unemployment rates in these target areas ranged from 15 to 24 percent, and minorities constituted 80 to 99 percent of the population. In this initial program, Hartford, with funding fr
