A sprawling piece of land next to the Calumet River in southeast Chicago used to house the steel industry. But the area has been vacant since the steel plants in the area began to close in the 1970s and ’80s—largely because the industry left the ground so contaminated that no developer can afford to clean it up.
A new project aims to bring jobs back to the neighborhood by building down instead of up. The Invert Chicago, “a subsurface real estate complex,” is designed to be built 300 feet below the surface. It avoids disturbing the contaminated soil, and has a second advantage: When you go that deep underground, the ambient temperature is a steady 60 degrees, even in subzero Chicago winters or sweltering summers.
Several developers have tried to make use of the land, which is around 90% the size of Disneyland, in the past. But the polluted soil was insurmountable. “There are contaminants in the current soil that go down about 20 to 30 feet, depending where you are,” Yun says. “There are certain hot spots all around there. Most developers have just walked away and said we can’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to clean up the site before we start constructing anything new.”
The engineers plan to leave huge, 36-by-36-foot pillars of limestone while the rest of the limestone is extracted and sold. The pillars will support large, cathedral-like spaces that can then be turned into individual buildings with more standard construction. The site may use renewable geothermal energy for heating and cooling, and the company plans to build a large solar field outside to provide electricity, including for LED lights that are carefully designed to mimic natural sunlight for workers underground.
In an economic study, the developers estimate that the project can create thousands of permanent jobs. Some related projects do already exist, including a storage facility carved out of underground rock in Kansas City. The Invert is working with the City of Chicago on entitlements and meeting with community members as it works on the final design. And it’s hoping that the development can help hasten the process of cleaning up the contaminated site on the surface.
“We’re literally creating new taxable property that currently doesn’t exist today,” Yun says. “That’s going to promote the overall value of this property to where years from now, and hopefully sooner than later, we can start addressing some of those concerns on the ground.”