City to provide grants for brownfield cleanup, development

The city is making a push toward cleaning up its vacant, underused brownfields and turning them into land usable for real estate development and open space, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith announced today. The new Brownfield Incentive Grant Program will award grants to developers and community organizations that study, clean up and develop contaminated land through more than $9 million in city funds, which will be made available over the next several years. Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, praised the initiative. “Assisting brownfield projects with small grants in the early stage is a great way to encourage the expeditious cleanup of these sites and provide an incentive for developers to invest in these challenging sites,” he said. TRD