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The Greyfields Are Coming! February 19, 2009 Circuit City is gone. So is Tweeter. Linens ‘n Things has closed its stores -- the company is trying to re-launch as a cyberspace-only vendor. Multiplex theaters in East Hartford and East Windsor are huge, vacant husks. Trumbull Center has lost many of its shops -- “it’s a shame so many businesses have left,” one longtime resident told the Connecticut Post last month. That’s capitalism. Once-viable enterprises collapse when consumer habits and demographic trends change. (Government’s always willing to pitch in, of course, with disastrous fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies.) But for those who benefit from central planning, economic struggles represent opportunities. Plenty of bureaucrats, politicians, and activists depend on strife in the marketplace -- it offers the chance to maintain, and perhaps even expand, their fiefdoms. (As a Connecticut corporate-welfare official recently advised, “Never waste a good crisis.”) So be on the lookout for talk of the need to shovel tax revenue at “greyfields.” The term derives from “brownfields,” a moniker for ex-industrial sites that are difficult for developers to rehabilitate, due to heavy environmental-cleanup costs. Greyfields, according to University of Connecticut planner John Rozum, are “large commercial areas with large parking lots that have come to the end of their lives.” Rozum says his colleagues are “scratching their heads and thinking, ‘What do we do with this?’” Don’t worry, they’ll come up with something. They always do. It won’t be long before greyfield-revitalization schemes join “smart growth,” “transit-oriented development,” “walkable communities,” and “downtown revitalization” as weapons in planners’ ceaseless crusade to control all land-use decisions. Lee S. Sobel, a greyfield pioneer, thinks the case for action is clear: “These underutilized sites damage the neighborhood psyche and remove a source of significant tax revenue, as they comprise one of the largest commercially zoned parcels within a community.” And it’s likely that more greyfields are on the way. Americans are avoiding stores at a record pace. CNN reports that in the last quarter of 2008, “[consumer] spending fell a record 8.9 percent -- the worst quarter … since the Commerce Department began tracking that statistic in 1947.” But before planners are allowed to run wild crafting responses to the latest pseudo-problem they’ve identified, some words of caution. Brownfield remediation is big business in Connecticut. In the last decade and a half, hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars have flowed to developers seeking to turn dilapidated, polluted properties into stores and housing units. Lawyers and consultants have accumulated countless billable hours. Pols have issued stacks of self-congratulatory press releases. “Sprawl” fusspots have peppered reporters with sound bites about why reclamation of toxic lands is “sustainable.” Yet very few brownfields have been reborn. Yes, there are occasional success stories. But debacles are far more common. (Even the completed projects are problematic. Might the tax revenue given to the developments have been better spent elsewhere? We’ll never know.) Red tape, liability confusion, unsound tax policies, excessive environmental standards, inept (and sometimes corrupt) local governments, and pork to developers more adept at flattering politicians and bureaucrats than generating profits are just some of the reasons for failure. The Brass City is ground zero for brownfield-cleanup efforts in the Nutmeg State. But it’s hardly qualified to serve as a poster child. “Time and again,” (Waterbury) Republican-American reporter Michael Puffer observed last year, “the city has seen its efforts to clean polluted sites for redevelopment fall flat, sometimes after hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent.” The defunct Norwich Hospital, a 480-acre property located mostly in Preston, is a brownfield. But despite over $10 million in state subsidies and borrowing to clean up the facility over the last dozen years, New London’s daily newspaper reports that it remains a “ghost town of about 50 empty buildings that are in far worse condition today than when the hospital officially closed for business.” While greyfields don’t share brownfields’ legacies of contamination, they’re hardly a cinch to turn around. “When [commercial facilities] become vacant,” warns C. James Gibbons, another UConn planner, “they are these huge, empty shells that are extremely difficult to remodel for another use.” There have always been a few kernels of truth in criticism of “affluenza” -- recent years have seen Americans purchase a lot of inadvisable goods and services. And many of those expenditures were made on credit. So with the economy in the dumpster, consumers are wisely cutting back. And greyfield-warrior wannabes are sure to seize their chance. Taxpayers should pay close attention. The “solutions” planners peddle are often costlier than the problems they claim to want to fix. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com. # # # # #
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