Greening Our Communities

By greening our built environment, we can revitalize existing communities and build strong new ones. By helping communities green themselves, Growing Greener empowers people to make decisions that fit their communities best and leverage the greatest local and private support.  The result is healthier, happier, safer and economically more prosperous communities and individuals.

Restoring Tree Cover

Tree-lined streets make communities look great, and they also clean the air, provide shade to cool buildings and paved areas, increase property values and help control stormwater. The loss of tree cover exacts a price from cities and their residents in many ways. As an example, annual flooding from stormwater runoff in the lower Delaware Valley will be 53 million cubic feet greater, at a cost of $105 million, because 34,000 acres of tree cover were destroyed over the past two decades. Loss of nearby tree cover also reduces the value of neighboring private property.

Growing Greener helps municipalities across the Commonwealth restore their tree covers. Communities provide the volunteer labor. Growing Greener, through TreeVitalize, helps with the purchase of trees and planting materials. It also provides the technical guidance to do the job right, for example, selecting trees appropriate to the local conditions such as overhead powerlines and sidewalks.

Working with Nature to Prevent Floods

For hundreds of years, if a stream was in the way of development, people buried it -- usually putting it in a pipe. If a flood occured, people built walls to hold back the next one. For awhile these approaches seemed to work; however, in the long run they have become problematic. Pipes fail; walls fail. Floods are happening with increasing frequency and with increasing economic losses, not to mention the mental anguish of those affected.  It is simply too costly to always build bigger pipes and bigger walls.

Fortunately, solutions that are both economically sensible and good for the environment are being found by communities -- often with the help of Growing Greener. People are restoring floodplains and streambanks, installing porous paving, and planting green roofs, so that these surfaces can absorb and hold rainwater rather than rushing the water to streams and low-lying areas.

Revitalizing Waterfronts and Parks

The industrial waterfronts of the 19th and 20th centuries have the potential to be transformed into some of the state's best recreational assets and most desired commercial and residential properties. Indeed, this is already happening, often with the help of Growing Greener. Likewise with the restoration of our older parks. Growing Greener has helped fund the critical planning, community consensus-building, land acquisitions, trail development and capital reconstruction necessary to revitalize these public assets for the use and enjoyment of new generations.

Creating Neighborhood Gardens

Pennsylvania's cities and boroughs largely lack the wide open spaces that rural communities enjoy, the green places of great beauty and practicality where people can both restore themselves and grow food. What many urban areas have in abundance though are abandoned lots. These vacant properties can and have attracted trash and vandalism. But in many neighborhoods, local leaders -- grandfathers, mothers, teens, all kinds of people who care about where they live -- often aided by Growing Greener, have reclaimed these properties, making them into vegetable and flower gardens maintained by neighborhood families. The gardens are things of great beauty and produce an abundance of fresh produce. How they bind communities together is priceless. How does Growing Greener help?: By supporting nonprofits that can deal with complicated ownership and control issues that arise with abandoned properties, by ensuring that lead paint-contaminated soils are remediated, and by assisting with the costs of materials.

Restoring Brownfields

Between 10,000 and 12,000 abandoned industrial sites, referred to as “brownfields,” lie idle in towns and cities in every county of the state. Brownfields offer between 100,000 and 120,000 acres of land, much of it in prime commercial or industrial locations. The original tenants ranged from steel mills to corner gas stations. Many now present hazardous situations to the surrounding community. Cleanup, reinvestment and re-use of these sites, rather than consuming scarce open space for new development, protects the urban environment, removes hazards, reduces the cost of stormwater flooding and saves green space for physical exercise, community gardening and other uses that benefit residents’ health. Economic studies indicate that every brownfield acre “recycled” represents four acres of open space saved from development.

The Hazardous Sites Cleanup Fund and other state programs in part address the brownfield problem. Growing Greener helps by addressing community-centered revitalization that may not fit well with the other state programs.

Restoring Stream Corridors

Pennsylvania’s urban areas hold much potential for increasing open space and improving the environment through restoration of stream corridors. Hundreds of miles of urban streams have been channeled, ditched and buried to make way for roads and buildings. “Daylighting” portions of buried streams and restoring a more natural stream corridor moderates stormwater flooding and reduces runoff damage downstream. Other streams can be restored through establishing “riparian buffers,” vegetated borders of trees and shrubs along the stream banks. Riparian buffers are relatively inexpensive to establish (about $1,200 per acre) but the investment pays back municipalities through absorbing runoff, moderating floods and the opportunity to use riparian corridors as parks and urban trails. While communities determine appropriate stream corridors to restore and volunteer labor to help, Growing Greener can help cover the cost of materials and heavy equipment needed in the restoration process.

Preserving History

By helping historic neighborhoods preserve their distinctive and appealing architecture, Growing Greener can support the efforts of people to revitalize their communities -- both their commercial "main streets" and their residential "elm streets".