Small Businesses as Culprits and Clients: A Comparison of Brownfield Redevelopment in Los Angeles and Kuala Lumpur

摘要

Contaminated properties or 'brownfields' are simultaneous symptoms and causes of community decline that have deleterious impacts on the prosperity of small-scale industry, however past research has not given adequate attention to the intersection of these two issues in understanding community evolution. Most brownfield policies in the U.S. have been driven by a top-down regulatory focus that prescribes how governments can force the cleanup of brownfields through the assignment of legal liability and/or protection to property owners, which has often resulted in an antagonistic relationship between governments and businesses whereby businesses are made to feel like 'culprits' for the brownfield problem. This alienation of businesses-particularly small businesses-complicates the brownfield solution because if businesses are made to feel like 'culprits', they are much less likely to participate as 'clients' in reusing former brownfields. The primary message of this report is that the solution to the brownfields problem hinges upon the buyin of small businesses because brownfields must be cleaned up and returned to productive reuse by small businesses and in communities that rely upon the success of small businesses to survive. Because brownfields depress communities by causing blight-socio-economic and environmental degradation- they are an obstacle to the survival of existing businesses and to the attraction of new businesses. This is particularly the case in communities that are or have been dominated by manufacturing industry since there has been a large-scale decline of the manufacturing sector in many U.S. cities that has left many brownfields in industrially-zoned areas.