Liberty Lake-based development company Greenstone Corp. is preparing for site work to begin at the Mead Works development, in north Spokane County.

Mead Works is a neighborhood development planned for more than 400 acres of land next to the Costco Wholesale Corp. store at 12020 N. Newport Highway, in Mead, and north of the old Kaiser Aluminum Corp. smelter site.

“This isn’t a site that was used for any industrial use. It wasn’t part of the smelter operation,” says Jim Frank, Greenstone’s CEO. “The land itself was land that Kaiser owned to provide a separation between the surrounding commercial and residential uses up in that area.”

Frank says permits for constructing the Mead Works infrastructure were approved in October after pandemic-related delays. Site work will begin this spring and will involve installing the sewer, water, and roadway systems.

Greenstone is the developer behind the Kendall Yards urban development on the north side of the Spokane River, northwest of downtown Spokane. Mead Works will be about five times the size of the Kendall Yards neighborhood and have a similar mixed-use urban development environment, Frank says. Once complete, the neighborhood development will have 1,400 residential living units and 1 million square feet of commercial space.

The development will take 20 years to complete, with an estimated total construction cost approaching $1 billion. After the infrastructure work is complete, construction of the residential units will begin in the fall, followed by construction of commercial, mixed-use buildings.

Frank says the residential construction value is estimated at about $600 million, and the commercial construction will cost another $300 million to $400 million.

A range of housing is planned at the site, including single-family homes, cottage homes, townhomes, multifamily units, and residential units over retail space as well.

“We really like to build neighborhoods that have a wide and diverse range of housing, so there are opportunities for people in a lot of different living circumstances to find homes within our neighborhoods,” Frank says.

He says environmental cleanup at Mead Works is complete and adds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy issued notice in December that further environmental cleanup work is no longer needed at the site.

“There was a drainage pond for stormwater and a drainage line that went across the site, and that’s all been cleaned up now,” Frank says. 

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