A massive commercial real estate project proposed for Chicago’s Southeast Side remains in limbo as its planners battle environmental activists over how best to rebuild the area’s economy.

A group backed by the Ozinga family wants to burrow several hundred feet beneath a contaminated former steel mill site and create a 6 million-square-foot underground storage facility called the Invert.

They say the project will create thousands of jobs and make a mostly empty chunk of land productive. As an underground facility, the project wouldn’t pollute the air or contribute to the high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases that plague the Southeast Side, developers argue.

But activists see it as another attempt to burden an already-polluted region.

“This idea didn’t come from the community and it’s not something we dreamed about,” said Gina Ramírez, Midwest regional lead for environmental health for the National Resources Defense Council and a longtime East Side resident. “Nobody says, ‘I’ve had this dream of having an underground mine in the neighborhood.’ ”

The project, which would be sandwiched between the Calumet River and thousands of East Side homes, is in a part of the city where a century of industrial activity left behind toxic soil and poisoned the air. Factories, mills and other industries historically clustered on the Southeast Side, often releasing toxic chemicals.

Many of the factories and mills are now gone, but the pollution left behind still damages residents’ health. Neighborhood life expectancy was lower than the Chicago average and residents suffered higher lead toxicity and asthma rates, according to a 2019 study by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute.

“Historically, this area has been the dumping ground, not just for the state of Illinois, but for the whole Midwest,” said Cheryl Johnson, executive director of People for Community Recovery, who began fighting pollution 40 years ago alongside her late mother, Hazel Johnson, at the Altgeld Gardens public housing development. “We’ve got 19 miles of waterways, but 11 miles of that is unfit for humans.”

A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Public Health said in a statement that the city supports sustainable economic development that prioritizes residents’ quality of life without compromising health and safety.

“The Department of Planning and Development is currently conducting the city’s industrial corridor planning, which aims to strengthen Chicago’s industrial corridors as economic engines and vital job centers while also using environmental justice principles to establish criteria and policies for geographies harmed by environmental degradation.”

The controversy surrounding the Invert project illustrates the sensitivity involved in bringing new industry into an area that has suffered industrial pollution in the past.

Alberto Rincón, senior vice president of Invert Chicago, said the group’s project won’t further pollute the neighborhood.

“This part of the city was once home to 100,000 steel industry jobs, but the problem is they’re gone now, so you have vacant brownfields that people don’t know what to do with,” he said. “This is a much cleaner, greener way to build. We’re actually cleaning up the site, so from our vantage point, we’re actually improving public health.”

But to Ramírez, the Invert sounds too good to be true.

“They keep saying they want all these green things, but none of it is a done deal,” she said. “What if they run out of money and leave us with a hole in the ground?”

The proposal

Ozinga’s group hatched the Invert plan several years ago, when it opened a community office in the East Side, a mostly Latino neighborhood, and began hosting public forums, showing off futuristic renderings and waging a public relations campaign to win local support.

“It seems they have a lot of money,” Ramírez said.

The Invert seemed to have won support from Ald. Peter Chico, 10th, who put forward early this year a proposed ordinance that could clear the way for its construction.

But the developers weren’t the only ones with clout. After fighting for decades to clean up South and West Side neighborhoods, the NRDC and other community groups scored political and legal victories, giving activists new tools to fight potential pollution and erecting new hurdles for developers of industrial projects.

They convinced the City Council to pass 2021’s Air Quality Ordinance, banning new incinerators, landfills and mining in Chicago. The ordinance requires developers of new warehouses, freight terminals, manufacturing, recycling and other uses to hold community meetings, address residents’ worries about pollution, and conduct air quality and traffic studies.

Activists also initiated a successful federal civil rights complaint challenging the concentration of polluting industries in certain neighborhoods, secured a settlement with the city and launched an anti-Invert campaign.

“Three times a week, we’re doing door-knocking,” said Oscar Sánchez, co-executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force. “That’s been a priority all summer.”

Southeast Side activists are also fighting for additional legislation to protect neighborhoods such as the East Side, Hegewisch and South Deering.

“The Air Quality Ordinance is the first of its kind, but there are still too many toxic sites in the 10th Ward, and to say this is unfair is an understatement,” Sánchez said. “We as a community deserve so much more, so for us it’s not about halting investment, it’s about attracting nontoxic industry.”

Rincón, of the Invert, says his project won’t be toxic.

Creation of the underground storage complex will involve excavating thousands of tons of limestone from up to 350 feet below the surface on a covered job site, partly by setting off micro-charges imperceptible above ground. Most of the material will then be removed over more than 10 years by rail or barges plying the nearby Calumet River, rather than trucks belching out exhaust fumes.

“Clearly, we acknowledge that this is an environmental justice area, which has environmental challenges,” Rincón said, but “we see almost no impact (on air quality).”

Marty Ozinga, CEO of Ozinga, the Mokena, Illinois-based concrete supplier behind the Invert, said opposition to the project was no surprise.

“But there used to be hundreds of people working there at a time, now there’s four or five,” he said.

The Invert got unwelcome news in April 2023 when Chicago Zoning Administrator Patrick Murphey ruled the project would be considered mining, an activity now banned.

The move was a bit of a surprise, Rincón said. Although limestone is a key ingredient in the concrete sold by Ozinga, they consider digging out limestone for the Invert a form of construction, something necessary to create an underground facility of this scale.

“The cheapest way to get limestone is to just go to one of the quarries and buy it,” Rincón said. “At the end of the day, we’re building infrastructure that is made to be here for generations.”

Chico, in January, introduced a proposed ordinance that would allow city planners to, after an extensive review, approve mining or excavation projects in portions of the city, including much of the Southeast Side, zoned for heavy industry. That proposal would need approval from the full City Council.

Chico’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Underground mining

One benefit of storing goods within hollowed-out limestone deep underground — in a facility like the Invert is proposing — is that temperature and humidity are steady throughout the year, said Robert Bauer, an engineering geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey.

“It’s already cool, and even if you have a power outage, it never gets cold,” he said.

Bauer said he believes workers can excavate limestone without disturbing nearby residents, even if they use explosives.

“Some of that scares people, but these would all be engineered blasts where you can control the amount of vibration that takes place, and it will be tremendously smaller than the blasting you see at surface quarries.”

Surface quarries were once common in the Chicago metro area, and several suburbs now have underground limestone mines, he added.

Northwest suburban Bartlett approved its first subterranean limestone mine in 2003, said Kristy Stone, the village’s director of planning and development services, and even though its entrance is less than 1,000 feet from Herons Landing, a housing development where single-family homes on average list for $660,000, residents don’t seem concerned.

“In the first year we had some complaints,” Stone said, before the miners went underground, but “I’m not aware of any complaints in the past 15 years. Most people have no idea that the village has an underground mine.”

Rincón envisions the 144-acre Invert site becoming Chicago’s version of SubTropolis, an underground business park established decades ago in an old limestone mine in Kansas City, Missouri, now with about 8 million square feet of leasable space and more than 2,000 employees. The Invert would attract pharmaceutical firms, data centers, vertical farmers and others, he added, and the site’s riverfront dock and rail spur will make it easy to both remove excavated limestone and ship goods in and out.

“Having those two things are incredibly rare, not just in Chicago, but the country, and in and of itself make a project of this magnitude possible,” he said.

Deep skepticism

Suspicion of new industrial development runs deep on the Southeast Side, and Ramírez and other activists say they don’t want a repeat of their fight with KCBX Terminals. Mounds of petroleum coke, a gritty black substance derived from oil refining, were left for years on KCBX sites along the Calumet River, wafting through neighborhoods and into homes. The company eliminated the piles by 2016.

Activists launched a Deny the Permit campaign to block a 2019 agreement between the city and Reserve Management Group that led the Ohio-based company to close its old metal shredder in the affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side and plan to open a more modern one on the Southeast Side. Then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot backed the idea but reversed course and in 2022 city officials denied the company a permit. A Cook County judge in August upheld that decision.

Environmentalists including Ramírez also helped push the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to add in early 2024 the former Acme Steel Coke Plant at 11236 S. Torrence Ave. to the Superfund National Priorities List, making it eligible for more federal cleanup funds. The 104-acre plant just west of the Invert project closed in 2001, but investigators recently found cyanide and mercury, a threat to nearby wetlands.

Ramírez just bought an East Side home, where she lives with her family, including a newborn, and said she doesn’t want them growing up like she did, breathing polluted air. She hopes the Southeast Side can attract clean industry, such as Method Products’ environmentally friendly soap manufacturing plant in the Pullman neighborhood, or the multi-billion-dollar plan to remake the long-dormant South Works into a quantum computing hub.

“Mining seems so archaic to me,” she said.

Not everyone opposes the project.

Cathi Ortiz, who lives just east of the Invert site and teaches community college classes, said she understands local concerns about pollution, but still wants to see the Invert project come to life, and keep young people in the neighborhood by providing jobs.

“Most of us had grandparents who worked in the steel mills, but when the industry fell apart, so did families,” she said. “How do we argue against a project that is this massive and the opportunities it will bring?”

The Invert’s push could get even tougher next year.

The city’s 2023 settlement of the Southeast Environmental Task Force’s federal complaint required an assessment of neighborhood pollution, and it showed the Southeast Side faced some of the worst long-term environmental burdens, said Robert Weinstock, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. It also required City Hall to revamp planning, zoning and land-use practices to protect hard-hit areas, and put together a Cumulative Impact Ordinance.

“We are still waiting for ordinance language to make this legal settlement a reality,” Weinstock said.

Weinstock added that he did not think such an ordinance would impair economic development within the city.

“Responsible businesses should already be considering all the impacts their business will have on their neighbors before they build a facility,” he said. “So, it shouldn’t change the way they do business at all.”

Ramírez said the NRDC and other environmental organizations remain committed to fighting the Invert proposal, including Chico’s proposed ordinance.

“They think they can out-resource the community groups that are against this,” she said. “But I don’t think they can outsmart us.”

Rincón said after spending more than three years meeting with neighborhood residents, he’s confident most support the Invert, and the project’s backers still feel good about their chances to launch it.

“It’s just about finding the right legal path forward,” he said.

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