The Administration, working with leaders from financial institutions, business, and community-based organizations, should convene a series of national forums to engage the financial community and private sector in sustainable community revitalization. These forums would identify opportunities for the private sector to engage and invest in sustainable community alternatives.40 They would open a dialogue to obtain high-level commitments from private sector leaders to partner with government, nongovernmental, and community development organizations on sustainable community initiatives and to help remove barriers and obstacles to sustainable community revitalization in metropolitan and rural areas.

Key stakeholders should continue to modify existing programs and jointly develop and implement new policies to make infill properties desirable to investors and better able to compete with greenfields. Developing infill property is often more costly and complicated than developing greenfields. Federal and state policies have been enacted that attempt to level the playing field between urban and exurban locations, but federal, state, and local governments should continue to review existing policies and develop new ones to provide the same level and quality of investment and services to the inner city and older suburbs as are provided to exurban locations. For example, the federal government should continue to review existing policies and develop new ones to fully implement brownfields legislation and its National Brownfields Partnership. States should investigate whether they can replicate the growth management initiatives of the city of Portland, Oregon, and the states of Maryland, Florida, and New Jersey.41 City governments should also work with business associations to reduce or eliminate regulations that impose costly and unreasonable barriers to business development in distressed communities.

Federal, state, and local governments and community nonprofits should develop networks to match green businesses with the needs of municipalities, communities, and each other. This initiative could be particularly relevant for facilitating outsourcing in ways that strengthen local economies and help fledgling green businesses find green suppliers and potential customers. For example, the Triangle J Council of Governments Industrial Ecosystem Development Project . a partnership between EPA, the North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance, regional development agencies, and local universities . is surveying companies in the Raleigh-Durham region to identify ways to turn the waste of one company into a raw material for another company. The Interagency Working Group on Environmental Technology is developing a database with Public Technology, Inc., to match the specific needs of state and local municipalities to appropriate environmental technology providers. Citizens in Appalachia are electronically tying their communities into the new world economy through the Appalachian Community Economic Network. With the Network's help, more than 20 entrepreneurs have found customers through the Public WebMarket, a project tapping the resources of the World Wide Web and orchestrated by the Center for Civic Networking.

Federal and state governments, community development corporations, and nonprofits should determine how existing programs for small businesses and microenterprises can be tailored for green and sustainable start-ups. Microbusinesses in the United States comprise an .invisible economy. that goes largely unnoticed in economic development debates. Recent research, however, reveals that microbusinesses with four or fewer employees generated 43 percent of the net new jobs created from 1990 to 1994. Multiple stakeholders should promote new economic opportunities for small businesses in low-income communities and address the difficulty of financing small commercial loans in rich and poor communities alike. Research to determine best practices, successful strategies, and the profitability of existing and potential sustainable investments in metropolitan and rural communities should be disseminated through trade associations, business groups, business schools, financing sectors, and the electronic and print media.