News
OUR EYES AND EARS
April 27, 2010
| Who better to ask about construction activity then those who are first on the scene? While doing due diligence, Pioneer Engineering is seeing a pick-up in new sites being developed. | |||
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| We snapped Jeffrey McClelland, Boyd Raveling, Alan Levine, and Wayne Smith in their Ukrainian Village office yesterday. The team is working on a site at Elston and Webster—a warehouse that will probably turn into retail. They're also at a CHA site at Roosevelt and Racine for redevelopment of affordable housing. Working with the Illinois EPA, they ensure soil on each site meets the criteria for the intended future use, or redesign the site so buildings, plumbing, and retention ponds don't go through contaminated soil. Sometimes, they say, the best solution is not to remove soil if its too far from the surface to do harm. Pioneer has been in the top three firms in the state for earning "no further remediation" letters for the last 20 years. | |||
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| Pioneer's 500-600 projects/year in 2006-2008 fell to about 300 last year, but they've seen a slight increase. Many recent jobs have come with help from SBA, HUD, or IHDA-funded projects, which tend to favor urban infill areas and frequently need assessment or remediation. The 25-person firm has been working on environmental remediation of reused sites for 21 years. Their favorite project over the last decade? The 40-acre University Village, completed in '06, which required clean-up from several industrial-type users, like auto dealers and dry cleaners, to create student housing and retail space at 14th and Halsted. |
