This summer the city of Chicago will open the Midwest Center for Green Technology in an industrial area three miles west of downtown. It will house Spire Solar Chicago, a manufacturer of solar energy equipment employing 100 people, along with Greencorps Chicago, the city’s own community greening and job skills program.

The building will be a model of environmental design—with solar panels, a rooftop garden and a storm water retention area using native wetlands plants. It will also be a community center where people can design their own landscapes and get advice about energy efficiency.

It’s a great Chicago success story, improving both the economy and the environment. And as if that weren’t enough, it was built on an abandoned brownfield, the site of a a rock crushing operation that was in constant violation of our environmental laws.

This project represents the next step in Chicago’s brownfield initiative, already one of the most aggressive and comprehensive in the country. In addition to cleaning up property and promoting redevelopment, we are now using our brownfields program to promote a new “green” business sector in Chicago.

By replacing sprawling and dangerous eyesores with new industry, we improve the quality of life for people in a neighborhood and give them new employment possibilities

Chicago’s brownfields program was born of necessity. In 1993, the city decided that if it really wanted to create jobs in our neighborhoods and improve the quality of life of our residents, we had to do something about abandoned industrial properties.

With a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2 million in general obligation bonds, Chicago set out to identify the problems and opportunities of brownfields cleanup.

By 2001, we had leveraged our original $2 million investment into nearly $100 million in loans, grants and settlements for use on brownfield redevelopment projects. We have completed 20 sites with a total area of more than 150 acres and are working on 66 sites with a total area of nearly 1,000 acres.

Our efforts have created or retained more than 2,200 jobs and increased the city's tax base by more than $3 million annually.

The new Gateway Industrial Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side is a good example of how our brownfields program creates jobs. It is being built on the largest illegal dump site of “Operation Silver Shovel,” a federal sting operation that prosecuted several public officials for taking bribes to allow illegal dumping.

The city Department of Environment is supervising the removal of 600,000 cubic yards of debris and the city Department of Planning and Development put together a package of incentives to attract industry that included $14 million in tax increment financing assistance and $13 million in low-interest loans.

The result is an industrial park that will open later this year. Its first occupant will be a company called StyleMaster, which is building a 1.5-million-square-foot building to manufacture and distribute plastic containers. StyleMaster will relocate 150 employees from its nearby facility and hire approximately 400 new employees.

Not all our brownfields programs are so big. One of the most popular, and visible, is our abandoned service station management program. By the end of 2000, we had leveraged the cleanup of 85 sites and the removal of more than 200 underground storage tanks. When we’ve been able to locate the owners, we’ve forced them to pay. Some of these sites have already been placed back into service as pocket parks and child-care centers, while others are ready to be redeveloped into new commercial sites and affordable housing.

We’ve learned that you have to have a comprehensive strategy that entails cooperation of many different agencies at every level of government, along with community organizations and not-for-profit economic development agencies. In city government alone, the brownfields program requires the cooperation of the departments of Environment, Law and Planning and Development, as well as World Business Chicago, our public-private economic development agency.

The biggest obstacle to the widespread redevelopment of industrial sites is difficulty financing cleanup. A quick and hard lesson every local official working on this problem learns is that cleanup is almost always expensive, and sufficient money is hard to come by.

That is because, in many cases, the cost of a cleanup exceeds the value of the property even if clean. The percentage of these kinds of sites will increase as the more valuable properties get cleaned and redeveloped. It falls to government to bridge the gap between the cost of cleanup and the amount that can be recovered upon redevelopment.

Finally, every mayor should understand that restoring brownfields is just one  important part of rebuilding a city in the 21st century. To build a healthy city, you need uncontaminated industrial sites for job-creating industries, but you also need good transportation to get employees to the site, good police protection so they can get there safely, affordable housing so they can live nearby, good schools to produce the employees of the future and good parks, libraries and other amenities so people will want to live in your city.

Richard M. Daley is mayor of Chicago.