[CPEO-BIF] Turning former landfill into housing in Plymouth Township, Michigan

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

News release
Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE)
November 1 ,2023


EGLE brownfield funding to help turn former landfill into housing in Plymouth Township

Landfills weren’t always licensed and regulated like they are nowadays. Time was, you’d just dig and hole, fill it with whatever, and then bury it or burn it. These impromptu dumps can be a nightmare for developers because the fill material usually isn’t stable enough to build on and the cost of excavating and hauling it away can kill a project.

That could have been the story for the 41661 Plymouth Road redevelopment in Plymouth Township. The township had been working to get the site redeveloped for years. The Plymouth Road and Haggerty Road corridors are full of good paying jobs and the township needs more high-end housing to go with them. Nel Hydrogen’s $400 million “gigafactory” is being built in Plymouth Township and will create more than 500 new jobs that will also increase the need for housing. The site on Plymouth Road, home to two former restaurants but currently vacant, is an ideal place for it… except for one thing: the makeshift landfill, buried and forgotten since the 1930s.

The developer discovered it during due diligence. The wood and random debris underground made a traditional building foundation a non-starter. The cost of removing it was too high, as was the cost of installing special deep foundations. Plymouth Township Supervisor Kurt Heise says the community is almost fully developed and 85% to 90% of the current housing is single-family, which means there aren’t a whole lot of other places left to build much-needed multi-family housing.  “What we knew for sure was it could not continue as a restaurant,” said Heise, so the call went out to EGLE for help finding a solution.

…

For the entire release, see
https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/mi-environment/2023/11/01/egle-brownfield-funding-to-help-turn-former-landfill-into-housing-in-plymouth-township

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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