By Clara Lincolnhol
There are 27,000 known brownfields, or sites contaminated with pollutants, dotting Michigan. Many of them are locations where factories once stood.
About half are what the state calls “orphan sites,” meaning there’s no responsible party that owns the land and would otherwise have to clean up the pollutants, said Phil Roos, the director of the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.
“Sometimes people don’t even want to touch it if they don’t know the nature of the contamination or can’t address it,” Roos said.
That’s why the state is funding restoration projects, offering developers grants of up to $2 million, he said.
The grants cover assessing what the contaminants are, the best ways of removing them and often helping with the first stage of clean up, Roos said.
“Because we have a lot of these sites around the state, we need to de-risk it by providing some funding that will allow whoever’s developing the site to raise capital to do the development, knowing that it’s safe and they don’t have to address those issues any further,” he said.
The grants stem from the state budget for RenewMI which allocates $77 million. RenewMI is the department’s environmental remediation program.
When brownfields are cleaned up, they can be revitalized and turned into new housing developments, parks, commercial establishments or new industrialization.
The Lugnuts Stadium in Lansing, home to a minor league professional baseball team, is on a former brownfield, Roos said.
Since 2019, the state has been funding brownfield cleanup. The department has done 474 redevelopment projects in 50 communities, leading to $184 million in incentives and creating over 20,000 jobs, he said.
Those projects included the Grayling Northern Market and the Grayling Sawmill in 2018. The Grayling Northern Market used to be a planing mill and lumber yard, while the sawmill was a hotel, saloon and stores.
There have been four brownfield clean-up projects since 2020 in Traverse City. The most recent project in 2025 is Grandview Vision.
The site used to be an ice cream factory, and an antique store is on the property next door, according to Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s website.
Cadillac has also seen four brownfield projects, including one in 2025 to clean up a former dry cleaners, grocery store and retail buildings.
In the past year, there has been an influx of housing developments built on cleaned-up brownfields. Roos said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made those projects a priority because of the state’s housing shortage.
“We can, in many cases, make it so there’s no threat to public safety and turn them into beautiful places to live,” he said.
However, not every brownfield site is equal, said Mike Witkowski, the director of environmental and regulatory policy at the Michigan Manufacturers Association.
Some “legacy sites” like abandoned gas stations and factories have contaminated an area to the point where the amount of money needed to clean it for residential development is unrealistic, he said.
There are different standards that dictate what brownfield sites can be used for while helping to prevent human exposure to harmful chemical pollutants, he said.
Those especially contaminated sites can still be cleaned up to meet standards for things like new industrial development.
“If you can come through and say, ‘All right, let’s turn this into a parking lot or another industrial setting and keep it at those standards’ – that’s really not only the best way to handle those contaminants, but it’s also the most economically sound for the state and private investment,” Witkowski said.He said the number of existing brownfields makes it impossible for the state to clean all of them, meaning private developers cleaning up sites is all the more important.
“One of the best things we can do is have a robust and and really well-functioning brownfield redevelopment program that allows these new private investment dollars to come in and say, ‘Hey, we want to build here on this site and not only are we going to provide jobs, but we’re also going to help clean up the the contaminants there and make this space usable property again,’” Witkowski said.
The Michigan Manufacturing Association opposes a bill currently in the Michigan Senate that would add additional clean-up standards, and extend liability for developers, saying it would likely discourage private investment into brownfields, he said.
“It really complicates it in a problematic way, which we feel is going to lead to less cleanups and less investment in our industrial sites and really more expansion into green space developments where there’s never been a development or any industry before,” Witkowski said.
He said the current brownfield program as it stands has been sufficiently vetted by the state and environmental engineers. It’s helped the economy grow across the state and has been successfully cleaning up contaminated sites.
“To try and bring that in a little bit or make change is going to hurt the trajectory of our environmental cleanups and economic growth,” Witkowski said.