From Wichita to Winooski, projects win smart growth awards

The redevelopment of “Old Town” in Wichita, Kansas, and the revival of downtown Winooski, Vermont, were among five projects across the nation that won National Awards for Smart Growth Achievement from the US Environmental Protection Agency Nov. 15. The 355,000-population City of Wichita established a public-private partnership with MarketPlace Properties to revive the 40-acre warehouse district, where banks, fearful of being held liable, had stopped making real estate loans after groundwater pollution was discovered there in 1990. In the years since, the district, known as Old Town, has experienced much reinvestment, including rehabilitation of eight historic buildings for residential use and an addition of 690,000 sq. ft. of retail and office space. The 7,000-person City of Winooski, near Burlington, Vermont, in 1999 began mobilizing residents for its Downtown Redevelopment Project, which reestablished the street grid that had been ripped out in the 1970s and added wider sidewalks and on-street parking, among other changes. Development includes about 500 new homes, with another 400 units planned; a new transit center; roughly 300,000 sq. ft. of offices, shops, and restaurants; and several neighborhood parks and public gathering places. In the category of equitable development, EPA gave a smart-growth award to the Bethel Center in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood, a low-income African-American area where the proposed closing of the Green Line transit station threatened to aggravate the neighborhood’s problems. With grants from the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, the two-story, 23,000 sq. ft. community center was built on a former brownfield in a location accessible to transit, providing a collection of social services, commercial services, and retail. The award for overall excellence went to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for establishing the Office of Commonwealth Development. The office’s goal is to coordinate state spending and policy decisions that influence where development occurs, to encourage innovative development locally, and to make private investment in good projects easier. Approximately 100 transit-oriented development (TOD) projects have been planned or completed, thanks in part to the state’s TOD Bond Program. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development won an award for its Fresh Foods Financing Initiative, a public-private partnership that provides grants and loans to help supermarkets locate in underserved communities. For more on the winners, visit www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/awards.htm.