Finding damaged/degraded land?

Any tips for finding available or potentially available degraded land? Is there a www.cheapdegradedlandforsale.com? Is there any more direct way than simply sifting through all of the land for sale or driving around and looking?

Jonathan Burger wrote:Any tips for finding available or potentially available degraded land? Is there a www.cheapdegradedlandforsale.com? Is there any more direct way than simply sifting through all of the land for sale or driving around and looking?

It doesn't hurt to set up a permanent search on a real estate website. Tell it you want at least X acres for no more than X dollars, and have it notify you if anything that cheap comes along. That's a start.

To find the ones that aren't listed...
What do they call those contaminated lots? Brownfield sites?
Here we go:
http://www.epa.gov/compliance/cleanup/revitalization/site-types.html
I wonder if you could take your local EPA agent to lunch and ask him if he knows of anybody looking to unload a troubling parcel for cheap? There's SOMEBODY in town who knows about those, you just need to find him.

Johnathan Burger : Up here in the extreme Northern part of New York, We are on the Wide belt of the Saint Lawrence River Valley, low double digits to the Canadian border!

We have two locally famous examples of Abandoned Gravel Pits that were transformed successfully over several years, One is the personal property of Builder/Sage Rob
Roy, a moderator here at Permies.com, the other one has a similar story and has been an intentional community for at least 15 years !

I would be very careful about other places where there has been industrial manufacture, or any thing that the Fed and State governments have labeled " Brownfields ", not
only are you limited to what you can negotiate being allowed to do with the property, You might be held responsible for later very expensive hidden 'contaminates', also if
a government agency 'proves' to its self that 'contaminates' on your neighbors property came from you - you could be held liable for ALL the Clean Up !

Hope this helps, you might want to make up another thread in the Green Buildings Forum !

As always, your comments and / or questions are solicited and are Welcome, think like Fire, flow like gas Don't be the Marshmallow ~ PYRO - Logically Big AL !

Late note : this is an area 4-5 A.L.

Most of these small brownfield sites belong to operating (or defunct) dry cleaning businesses. At least the majority on the list of brownfields in my area. There are ways to remediate dry cleaning solvent contaminated dirt: (1) air stripping, where shallow wells are drilled and air is pumped down to encourage the volatile solvents to rise up, and (2) burying scrap iron. Method #2 is really useful if the contamination is moving in a particular direction, then you can put lots of iron across the flow and as it rusts in the soil, it inactivated the solvents. But I don't see a whole lot of initiative on anyone's part, property owner, local or state government, or EPA, that this has to get done chop, chop.

Is your motivation really to find www.cheapdegradedlandforsale.com? Then the best advice is to keep your eye on auctions, bank repo sales, tax delinquency sales, and others where the buyers are not waiting to get a price to sell.

Search for clearcut/ cutover pieces of land, they give you a clean slate, and can be cheaper than surrounding forest land.

Jonathan Burger wrote:Any tips for finding available or potentially available degraded land? Is there a www.cheapdegradedlandforsale.com? Is there any more direct way than simply sifting through all of the land for sale or driving around and looking?

You might want to be more specific in location, and as the others said, what type of degraded property? Here, in Mississippi, there is a lot of "cut-over" land at cheap prices.

Hi John,

Thought I would respond a little to your post--you certainly do want to inspect any potential property and make sure that somebody knows where it is and how to get there, you may discover all sorts of interesting things about "cheap" land such as (1) no GPS coordinates, (2) no road (3) easement required to legally access the property (4) unusual potentially problematic structures on the perimeter 94) evidence that the property is regularly used as the local biker/teen hangout, etc. Yes in this day of Google Earth and satellite intel, you could with GPS coordinates get a fair look at any potential property paying particular attention to the location of the color green, and as to whether there are seasonal what are called arroyos in the SW (rivers fed by Winter snow melt) on the property....I'm afraid there is no substitute for boots on the ground in the inspection of property, but if you can work out the above issues in advance, you have at least a good chance of actually standing on the property itself. Apologies if any of this advice is redundant to other postings..Mike