National City Brownfields - Community Inventory Results

Identifying Locations of Community Concern in National City

National City Brownfields Assessment Project at SDSU (Carson McKinstry & Jason Woo)

August 1, 2023

_{This StoryMap is currently being translated to Spanish and Tagalog}

You Responded, We Listened!

The maps showcased below were created based on our community kick off workshop in March, 2023. Thank you for participating in the workshop and for providing brownfields site nominations. Nominated sites are documented below.

A Refresher - What's a brownfield?

A brownfield is a piece of land where the use or reuse may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of contamination.¹ Brownfields are often vacant or have vacant structures. Often, environmental assessment is necessary to determine actual site conditions.

This can include places like former gas stations, older commercial properties with contamination from lead and asbestos, dry cleaners, illegal dumping sites, and others. Brownfields can pose environmental and human health risks and the presence or potential presence of contamination can introduce uncertainty associated with a site's reuse.

Why is it Important for the Community to Nominate Brownfield Sites?

Community brownfield site nomination is crucial for several reasons.

Official tracking of environmental contamination and historic site use is limited by data quality issues including outdated information, misclassification, and lack of inter-agency cooperation.
Existing environmental agency data on brownfields is incomplete.
Local knowledge allows for the identification of sites that aren't just brownfields, but are also important to community members, enabling us to uncover valuable information that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

On March 23, we held a community meeting to kick off our brownfields site nomination process. At this first meeting, we received over 100+ responses.

Brownfield sites were nominated at this meeting through marking locations on paper maps, digital submissions, and hand-written site nomination forms.

Many responses highlighted a few key areas of concern. In particular, three hotspots emerged from clusters of points.