Economic development efforts are often a key driver to getting the ball rolling on redevelopment of Brownfield properties.

Separately, the energy and creativity that come from the instructors and students at our institutions of higher education often result in great progress in research and problem solving.

Add economic development and higher education together and you get The University Economic Development Association (UEDA).

I talked with John Roberts (jarobert@iastate.edu, President of UEDA) today about his organization and learned that it’s a great place for students to learn about and get involved in the economic development community. Check it out at www.UniversityEDA.org!

Another great article by Thomas Jackson (see his other articles posted here about valuation of contaminated land).

“The earliest notions of stigma and its effect on property values held that any adverse environmental impact on property value could be categorized as environmental stigma. This notion of stigma made it difficult to explain and even more difficult to measure….Recent empirical research has found that parties to real estate deals are increasingly knowledgeable and experienced in dealing with environmental risks. As knowledge and experience increases, risk is more accurately assessed, and generally risk related effects on property values decrease.”

Comment: As always, if you have an appraisal issue with respect to contaminated land, Thomas Jackson should definitely be on your call list.

This article concludes that industrial properties with known unremediated contamination transact at prices 30% less than properties without known contamination issues, and subsequent to remediation, recover to values similar to those without known contamination issues.

Comment: After reading this artice a couple of times, I’m quite sure I’ll never understand all of the statistical modeling behind it’s methodology and conclusions. One thing I do understand is that if any of our readers are even remotely interested in talking with an appraiser who knows about environmentally distressed properties, they absolutely must call Thomas Jackson (http://www.real-analytics.com/). I have to believe he is the, or at least one of the, top specialist(s) in the world at being able to combine appraisal of industrial real values (this alone is a very complex issue, when done correctly with regression analysis, researching all the appropriate attributes of value) with the the additional task of seeking out the scarce information available on transactions for contaminated land, and analyzing them both and making conclusions in such a logical and defensible manner.

The attached publication from 10/02 was by Kristen Yount - BIO (Northern Kentucky University) and Peter Meyer - BIO (University of Louisville).

While written in very understandable format, the subject is very complex and the work that has gone into this must have been tremendous.

I imagine government folks and those in the insurance industry will be most interested, but the nature of the subject requires the publication to provide some of the best explanations of environmental insurance that you can find.

One major theme appears to be finding ways to combine one policy over a number of properties or owners, that otherwise would not be valuable enough to justify an environmental insurance policy on an individual basis.

Keep this document to review the next time you forget the details about a particular type of policy.

Below is some information about the University of Louisville Brownfields/Smart Growth Research Group as well as a link to their web site.

The Research Group has helped private sector parties analyze investment decisions and risk-based decision-making. They have also assisted in the design of public policies for local and regional governments and state EDC and environmental agencies.

Follow-up: The Research Group has an extensive list of research papers on their web site that interested parties might want to review.