White Bluffs Solar Station is near a nuclear power plant.

Drive down just about any major thoroughfare in any U.S. town, and you’ll pass a fenced-off lot littered with crumbling concrete, patches of weeds and heaps of debris. While the aboveground scene might look scary to onlookers, the landscape below is likely even more appalling.

Brownfields, the common term for abandoned or underutilized sites that have been contaminated through industrial pollution, are the polar opposites of greenfields, a phrase used to describe unspoiled tracts of land. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates there are between 500,000 and 1 million U.S. brownfield sites, which represent an estimated $2 trillion of undervalued real estate, according to industry experts.

Yet despite the abundance of brownfield properties and their rock-bottom price tags, many developers have until recently avoided the risky business of brownfield redevelopment — for good reason. Due to ever-evolving technologies, cleanup costs can be difficult to predict. A number of unknowns inherent to abandoned properties have the potential to become a liability. Brownfield redevelopment almost always involves public involvement, and often requires partnerships between federal and state agencies, as well as city and county governments: In other words, they can take a long time. Developers also have to shake the stigma that brownfields are dangerous places.

“It’s not formulaic,” says Jonathan Philips, senior director for Raleigh, N.C.- based Cherokee Investment Partners, which has acquired over 520 brownfield properties since 1990. “It’s communityspecific, site-specific and market-specific.”

Philips notes Cherokee, whose latest investment fund totaled $1.74 billion, has historically not relied on government assistance for remediation costs. “We operated under the premise that this is a private sector answer to a public problem.”

Yet for smaller companies, federal and state assistance can make or break a potential brownfield redevelopment project. EPA funded its first brownfield pilot project in 1994, and in the last seven years, Congress doled out $163 million annually to EPA’s competitive brownfields grant program, not including the federal Superfund program. Numerous state agencies and many local governments also provide financing for brownfield redevelopment projects. And to further incentivize brownfield development, the U.S. government offers tax deductions for cleanup costs the year they are incurred. All state and federal assistance for brownfield renovation are only available to non-liable parties.