The city of Middletown recently won a combined $300,000 state grant for a brownfield opportunity study to further spur redevelopment on the Middletown Community Campus.
Once home to an anchoring state psychiatric hospital, the campus has largely been abandoned since 2006 because of statewide consolidation, with the exception of a few remaining institutions.
The first wave of private investments poured into the 230-acre campus years ago when an academy and college moved in, followed by a medical center and an elementary school.
Middletown Mayor Joseph DeStefano hopes that the study will further propel the momentum.
“This is basically our last large area for potential redevelopment,” Mr. DeStefano told The Epoch Times. “The city has only five square miles with a 30,000-plus population. We have pretty heavy density, so this is our last major redevelopment opportunity.”
Created in 2003, the state-funded Brownfield Opportunity Area Program aims to help local municipalities develop community-informed plans to revitalize vacant and abandoned properties.
According to Maria Bruni, director of the Middletown Economic and Community Development Agency, one practical benefit of the brownfield study is the identification of contaminated sites on the campus and the subsequent access to potential cleanup money from the state government.
For example, areas surrounding the abandoned power plant on campus likely have contamination issues, which must be resolved before redevelopment can happen.
Additionally, the study will help the city figure out a comprehensive redevelopment plan for the entire campus with input from community members, according to Adam Bosch, president of the regional think tank Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress.
The nonprofit was a co-applicant for the brownfield study grant and will work closely with the city of Middletown on carrying out the research project over the next two years or so.
“The community partnership part of this process is very important because, ultimately, the community decides what they want to see done,” Mr. Bosch told The Epoch Times.
He said the community will be part of discussions about what some vacant and abandoned parcels will be used for in the future, what the city of Middletown has now that people would like to see more of, and what the city does not have that it would benefit from.
He noted that once the community-informed study is finalized, redevelopment projects conforming to community wishes may be eligible for additional tax credits.
Mr. Bosch also hopes that the study can inform ways to better connect the campus on Monhagen Avenue to the rest of the city, enhancing synergy on a larger scale.
However, most such studies were done in municipalities outside of the Hudson Valley, a region that deserves more attention because many of its former industrial cities and villages are plagued by long-vacated and decayed buildings, according to Mr. Bosch.
“We are going to continue to focus on these sorts of projects around the Hudson Valley to make sure we are giving our small cities and villages the best chance possible at pumping new life into these sites that have been vacant for so long,” he said.
In addition to Middletown, Pattern for Progress has worked with the city of Kingston on a similar brownfield area study for a 270-acre area along the Broadway corridor.
