Federal officials traveled to Manchester this week to make a pointed case to New Hampshire developers and housing advocates: the cleanup of contaminated industrial land — known as brownfields — is one of the most under-used tools available to address the state’s housing shortage.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development co-hosted a forum at Saint Anselm College, drawing local housing experts and state officials into a conversation that focused less on environmental cleanup as an end in itself, and more on remediation as a path to building the homes New England desperately needs.
Why Brownfields Are a Housing Story
The connection between contaminated land and housing scarcity is more direct than it might first appear. Much of New Hampshire’s most accessible terrain is already developed, conserved, or otherwise off the table for new construction. The remaining parcels often include former mill sites, gas stations, dry cleaners, and industrial yards — places where decades-old contamination has scared off developers and lenders.
Mark Sanborn, who leads the EPA’s New England operations, made the math plain.
“You need space to build housing,” Sanborn told the audience. “We are passionate about the ability to execute these programs to create great environmental and public health impacts and outcomes, and then create the opportunity that can be used for another serious public policy challenge we have here.”
In New Hampshire, brownfields funding has already turned former industrial sites into offices, affordable housing, and parking lots. According to reporting by NHPR, the program has a long track record in the state — but not nearly the scale of uptake that officials say it could support.
The “Look Away” Problem
One of the bottlenecks, according to federal regulators, is timing. Developers tend to delay environmental due diligence until they have already lined up a project, a buyer, or financing — at which point any unexpected contamination finding can blow up the deal or the construction schedule.
Jessica Dominguez, who manages brownfields work in New England for the EPA, said that pattern is one of the biggest issues she sees in the field.
“These legacy sites have been there. We know they’re there. But people don’t want to look at them until they want to build on them,” Dominguez said. “Everybody wants to build, but we need the correct information to protect public health.”
Her message to developers and municipalities: assess earlier, plan around what you find, and use the federal funding that exists to clean up what needs cleaning. The earlier in a project’s life that environmental data lands on the desk, the cheaper and faster a path to housing becomes.
Local Operators Want Process, Not Just Money
Panelists at the Saint Anselm event spent considerable time on the gap between brownfields funding being available and brownfields funding being usable. The program’s design — built around environmental protection — sometimes runs ahead of what works for housing developers operating on tight timelines and tighter margins.
Michael Monte, the CEO of the Champlain Housing Trust, pointed to a procedural change he said could materially speed up projects: combining two public comment periods that are currently required to run consecutively.
“Time is money. When you’re doing development, the only thing that matters is how quickly you can go,” Monte said. “We could move something faster when you do those things concurrently.”
It is the kind of administrative tweak that does not generate headlines but can determine whether a project pencils out at current interest rates. Housing developers across New Hampshire have been making similar arguments at the state level, where lawmakers are working through a slate of bills aimed at unlocking dead-end-road parcels and adjusting other zoning constraints that limit where homes can be built.
EPA Says Cuts Won’t Slow the Program
The visit came against a backdrop of organizational change at the EPA, including the closure of the Office of Research and Development. Sanborn told the panel the move would not deprive the brownfields program of the scientific expertise it needs to make remediation calls.
“We have all the access we need to the scientists in the agency,” he said. “We’ll have great cleanups, and then it’ll create a space that has an ability to be reused for another important purpose for our community.”
He also signaled that the agency’s broader posture is moving toward speed.
“We want to make good science-based decisions, but we want to get through that process so we can actually start doing the work and removing those public health risks from the community,” Sanborn said.
What This Means for New Hampshire Buyers, Renters, and Towns
For Granite Staters, the practical takeaway is that the inventory of land that could realistically support new homes is larger than the inventory of obviously buildable parcels suggests — but only if towns, developers, and the federal government can move legacy industrial sites through the cleanup pipeline efficiently.
The stakes are high. New Hampshire’s housing crunch has driven up rents, pushed home prices to levels that lock out first-time buyers, and made it harder for employers to recruit. Each remediated and redeveloped parcel — the former mill in Berlin, the old gas station in Concord, the contaminated lot near a downtown — is one more piece of the supply equation. With the state’s economy holding steady but workers losing ground, housing supply has emerged as one of the most consequential policy levers in front of state and federal officials.
The federal officials who showed up in Manchester clearly believe the brownfields program is being used at a fraction of its potential. The question now is whether New Hampshire developers and municipal leaders will respond to the invitation.
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