RAINIER COURT, an urban village of apartments and commercial spaces, boldly rises in the heart of Seattle's Rainier Valley, defying the history of the property it occupies.

For nearly a half-century, the 7-acre site was the territory of druggies, dilapidated buildings and piles of junk, including old cars, oil drums and household garbage. The ground became saturated with chemicals from industrial solvents and metals, and leaky underground storage tanks made sure the damage went even deeper.

Today, the property has life and a future. Rainier Court, a mixed-use development that broke ground in 2003, is now home to The Courtland, 208 affordable senior housing units and 9,000 square feet of retail, and The Dakota, 178 affordable family housing units and 9,000 square feet of retail. More work to reclaim the site is planned, with additional housing units slated to open over the next two years to fill out the property. Dave Cook, a principal at Seattle-based GeoEngineers, an earth science and technology consulting firm, is one of several partners working with SouthEast Effective Development, the  nonprofit developer of Rainier Court.

He says that you approach a brownfield like a dogged researcher, uncovering how it was contaminated and planning how best to remove the contamination. "You're kind of a historian and a detective. That's how the process starts."

The impacts of breathing life into the property extend beyond its boundaries, he says. "We have clients now that are looking for property around here. This project has really been a catalyst."

Rainier Court underscores a real estate revolution under way in Washington state: the cleaning up and redeveloping of brownfields ? abandoned parcels of land that have been contaminated by low concentrations of hazardous waste but nonetheless have potential as beacons of economic opportunity and city renewal. Brownfield redevelopment is surging as government funding increases, private and public partnerships form, and laws change in favor of reclaiming polluted sites for public use.

INCREASING DEMAND The state's current 2007-2009 cleanup budget is $77 million, up 97 percent from the $39 million set aside in 2001-2003, and developers and local governments are taking notice. "There's a lot of demand out there," says Dan Koroma, brownfields coordinator for both the state Department of Community Trade and Economic Development and the Department of Ecology.

For example:

·         The Thea Foss Waterway in Tacoma, a 27- acre, 1.5-mile inlet off Commencement Bay, was cleaned up to the tune of $105 million, bringing in $800 million in private investment in the form of condominiums, apartments, retail and the Museum of Glass;

·         Kendall Yards, a 78-acre former railroad yard northwest of downtown Spokane, is planned to have 2,600 residences and 1 million square feet of commercial space;

·         On a smaller scale, the Old Highway Garage building in downtown Sprague had been vacant since the late 1980s, its half-acre plot contaminated with petroleum, asbestos and lead. A state government loan of $161,000 helped the city clean up the site so it can be redeveloped.

A variety of forces, primarily changes in land use and environmental policies, the rising price of land in urban areas, and more opportunities for developers, governments and specialty firms to team up, are intersecting to push brownfield redevelopment into the mainstream of the state's real estate industry.

One result of Washington's 1990 antisprawl Growth Management Act has been that undeveloped land is becoming scarcer and more expensive, making long-forgotten brownfields ? often found in older city neighborhoods or along abandoned industrial waterfronts ? more economically feasible to redevelop. When Kim Nakamura, the president of Rushforth Construction, and his partners bought the property for the Thea's Landing condominiums in 2003, it cost $12- $13 per square foot. A few years ago, another site on the Thea Foss Waterway was fetching $35 per square foot, and now property in the area runs $50-$100 per square foot. "When you start to think about those numbers, you can now afford to deal with these issues with contaminated sites," Nakamura says. "Land is scarce and therefore it is going to drive us to do different things."