Overview of Existing Studies on Community Impacts of Land Reuse

The productive reuse of properties that are contaminated by hazardous substances has been increasingly emphasized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state and environmental agencies. As reuse on contaminated sites has grown, the documentation and analysis of the beneficial effects of such reuse also has expanded. This paper reviews the existing literature on the effects of reuse— summarizing the principal studies, measures of beneficial effects, and associated data— and discusses conceptual issues and difficulties that need to be addressed when estimating the beneficial effects of reuse. Studies included in the review represent a range of scales from the national to the local level and four different methodological approaches (routine data collection, case studies, survey-based methods, and analytical approaches). Directions for improving estimation of the beneficial effects include a wider variety of metrics for capturing the effects, an increased emphasis on the distribution of these effects, and a more rigorous economic accounting perspective.