Brownfield Redevelopment Calculator

This calculator weighs whether cleaning up and redeveloping a contaminated (brownfield) site pencils out financially. It nets your cleanup cost against an incentive percentage — representing EPA grants, tax credits under IRC Section 198, or state Voluntary Cleanup Program benefits — to get a net cleanup cost, then adds per-acre development cost to arrive at total investment. Value gain is the spread between the site's current impaired value per acre (depressed because of the contamination stigma) and its projected redeveloped value per acre once cleanup and construction are done, both scaled by acreage. Net profit is that gross value gain minus total investment, and ROI expresses net profit as a percentage of what you put in.

Payback period assumes the redeveloped property generates rental income at a 7% annual yield of its total value — a simplified commercial real estate assumption, not a lease-specific projection — and divides total investment by that annual income. The calculator also runs a brownfield-versus-greenfield comparison: it prices an equivalent greenfield alternative by assuming raw land costs 40% of the fully-developed value, plus the same development cost, then reports the dollar savings brownfield redevelopment offers thanks to lower land acquisition costs and available incentives. A liability reduction score (0-100) is a rough qualitative index built from three flags — whether cleanup is happening at all, how much incentive coverage you have, and whether the project is profitable — rather than a regulatory or actuarial risk metric. Because land values, development costs, and incentive percentages are all user-supplied assumptions, run multiple scenarios rather than trusting a single set of inputs.