Maine�s Brownfields: The Costs and Contexts of Rural and Urban Brownfields Redevelopment

Maine’s communities have a proud legacy of developing around manufacturing mainstays such as lumber, paper, and textile mills. While fundamental to the state’s economy, the closure of many of these businesses through the present day has left many places burdened with degrading industrial infrastructure in addition to the loss of their economic base. This paper examines how communities across the urban-rural divide have approached assessment, remediation and redevelopment utilizing funds from federal and state brownfields programs. Leveraging data from the Environmental Protection Agency, we compare the site and grant profiles of Maine’s urban and rural brownfields to determine unique challenges faced by each on the path to revitalization and redevelopment. We find that more rural brownfields have been successfully redeveloped in count and proportion when compared to their urban counterparts, and that their redevelopment takes less time. We also find that rural clean up costs are less than half those of their urban counterparts, despite similar detected contaminants and larger property sizes. Given our results, we sketch out a research agenda to explain these differences and further quantify the economic and environmental benefits that successful revitalization brings to rural and urban areas.