The BOA program provides funds to community-based organizations to develop plans for areas with multiple vacant properties or brownfields, former industrial sites where development may be stalled due to perceived or actual contamination. As a mission-oriented, community-based, non-profit real estate developer, CHLDC’s interest in redeveloping East New York’s brownfields is based on its belief that land and the built environment can be used strategically to address many of the challenges associated with underinvestment and poverty. 

With funding from the New York State BOA program, CHLDC embarked on an ambitious and community-based, participatory planning process to select underutilized sites that had strong potential to be developed to meet key community needs, including affordable housing, improving the quality of the local food landscape, and advancing the local manufacturing economy. Throughout the multi-year process, we created and helped facilitate stakeholder workshops for hundreds of residents and conducted an in-depth analysis of the opportunities to grow the manufacturing sector of East New York, including an expansion of the food sector, which was documented in the Manufacturing Opportunity Analysis.