Health Centers Find Opportunity in Brownfields

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Health Centers Find Opportunity in Brownfields

By RONDA KAYSEN

PHILADELPHIA — The community health center rising on a derelict corner here in West Philadelphia never would have broken ground if not for the asbestos inside the building that was demolished to make way for it. Because of the contamination, Spectrum Health Services received a $2 million federal cleanup grant, the first piece of a $14 million construction financing puzzle.

When complete, the 36,000-square-foot building will provide a new home for a health center that has been squeezed into a deteriorating strip mall nearby for decades. It will also be the latest in a nationwide trend to replace contaminated tracts in distressed neighborhoods with health centers, in essence taking a potential source of health problems for a community and turning it into a place for health care. In recent years, health care facilities have been built on cleaned-up sites in Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Oregon and California.

“These health care providers are getting good at it,” said Elizabeth Schilling, policy manager for Smart Growth America, an advocacy group. “They have internalized the idea that this is an opportunity for them.”

Because these sites are contaminated, many qualify for government tax credits and grants, providing health centers with vital seed money to build. Community health centers, by design, exist to serve populations in poor neighborhoods, where there also tend to be available but contaminated properties like old gas stations, repair shops and industrial sites.

In fact, many of the country’s 450,000 contaminated sites, known as brownfields, are in poor neighborhoods, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These tracts are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities because contaminated sites are more difficult to redevelop if property values are depressed. Banks are often reluctant to finance construction on a property that might require a costly cleanup.

“In communities where the real estate market isn’t working that well, you end up with a brownfield,” said Jody Kass, executive director of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a brownfield advocacy group.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Phyllis B. Cater, chief executive of Spectrum Health Services. “The environmental issues are significant and yet there are scarce resources for communities to do the cleanup and remediation that’s required.”

But if the state or federal government provides the first piece of financing, other funders are more likely to fall into step.

Community health centers, in particular, are under pressure to grow. By 2015, the number of Americans who rely on community health centers for care is expected to double to 40 million from the 20 million who relied on the centers in 2010, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. The Affordable Care Act allocated $11 billion to expand these centers. Of that, $1.5 billion was allotted to construction.

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