After facing expensive environmental cleanups with Hickory Woods and the city's initial Sycamore Village plan, City Hall decided it could avoid similar problems by requiring extensive soil remediation whenever a new home is built on property provided by the city.

Under the city regulations, about two feet of soil must be removed, and replaced with

certified clean fill, to eliminate the presence of possible lead and other metals in soil.

Developers say the process costs about $30,000 to $40,000 on each development site.

They also said it's an unnecessary expense.

"It's overkill," the Rev. Richard A. Stenhouse, who runs a development corporation, said.

Developer Dennis M. Penman, who heads the city's economic development agency, agreed.

"It's the stupidest thing I ever heard of," Penman said.

Photo gallery: A virtual tour of a Sycamore Village house

Related: Housing upgrades — at any cost

Related: Sycamore residents devoted to East Side revitalization

The Hickory Woods and Sycamore Village properties had once been used as industrial sites,

Penman noted.

On residential areas that have always been residential, the traditional requirement of

adding four inches of new topsoil is sufficient, he said.

The $30,000 to $40,000 price tag, Penman said, makes it impossible for private developers

to build affordable housing in Buffalo in today's market — unless government picks up

the remediation costs as well as the homeowner subsidy.

In fact, Stenhouse said he has been able to reduce the cost in some instances by having

some of the work done as part of a demolition, before the city transfers a lot to his

development corporation.

In most cases, however, the cost of the soil remediation for nonprofit organizations

building subsidized houses on land obtained from the City of Buffalo is picked up by the

federal government as part of the "development subsidy" that helps fill the gap between what a

house costs to build, and what it sells for.

City officials, meanwhile, say that they are aware of the developer complaints but that the

soil remediation is much less expensive than the cost of dealing with environmental problems

discovered after houses are built and sold.

Buffalo was forced to make $7.2 million in payments to residents of Hickory Woods, a South

Buffalo housing development the city built on contaminated soil. The city spent several

hundred thousand dollars on demolition costs associated with three houses built in Sycamore

Village before that soil, a brownfield site contaminated with chromium, lead and mercury, was

cleaned up.

Much of Buffalo's 42 square miles have been exposed to industrial activity in the past,

said Peter K. Cutler, a spokesman for Mayor Brown W. Brown.

What's more, just adding topsoil, as Penman suggested, isn't sufficient because it could

blow away, another city official said.

"They [developers] don't carry our liability," said Yvonne C. McCray, director of housing

in the city Department of Strategic Planning. "At the end of the day, the city can rest

assured we don't have a repetition of Hickory Woods, and the people living there will know

where they are living is clean, down to bedrock.

Nonetheless, McCray said there is "ongoing discussion" in City Hall about the soil policy.

sschulman@buffnews.comnull