Highland Bridge Was Cleaned Up. The Lot Across the Street Wasn't.

"An incomplete cleanup poses a risk to taxpayers." That's what U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum wrote to state regulators earlier this year about a stretch of riverfront in Highland Park that most people driving down Mississippi River Boulevard have never noticed. It sits behind a chain-link fence, capped in concrete, doing duty as an overflow parking lot. It is not part of Highland Bridge. It never was.

If you've been reading about Highland Park's transformation over the past few years, you've probably absorbed the headline version: Ford's old assembly plant closed in 2011, Ryan Companies took over as master developer, and the 135-acre site got scrubbed to residential standard before the first row home broke ground. All of that is true. What it leaves out is that "the Ford site" was never one parcel. It was three, named A, B, and C when Ford first reported them to state regulators, and only two of them got the cleanup that made Highland Bridge possible to build and sell as housing.

The third one, Area C, sits directly across the boulevard from the development, at the base of the river bluff next to Hidden Falls Regional Park. It's still Ford's property. It's still being negotiated. And in 2026, it's still an open question exactly what happens to it.

Two Sites, One Name

Highland Bridge's main plant parcel received an MPCA certificate of completion for environmental cleanup in July 2019, the milestone that let Ford sell the land to Ryan Companies and let builders start pulling permits. That's the cleanup people mean when they say the Ford site is done. It covered the ground under the rowhomes, the apartments, the Lunds & Byerlys, all of it.

Area C is a different legal and physical animal. From roughly 1945 through 1966, Ford dumped paint sludge and solvents from its painting operations at the base of the bluff, then let construction crews bury it under decades of rubble, including debris the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers added during a Lock and Dam No. 1 rebuild in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and debris the city of St. Paul added during a Mississippi River Boulevard reconstruction in the late 1980s. None of that got touched by the 2019 certificate. It's a separate 22-acre site with its own separate regulatory track, and as of this year that track hasn't reached a finish line.

What's Actually Under That Parking Lot

The pile itself is described in state and advocacy documents as roughly 70 feet tall in places, sitting on the river's floodplain and inundated during high water, including twice during 2023 flooding and again in 2024. Contaminants identified over years of soil borings and groundwater sampling include solvents, metals, asphalt-related compounds, and PCBs. The site was removed from the federal Superfund list back in 1990, but it's remained in Minnesota's voluntary investigation and cleanup program ever since, with Ford required to keep monitoring wells in place and report results to the MPCA.

None of this means the groundwater is currently unsafe. The MPCA's own risk assessment, prepared by the Minnesota Department of Health, found that under current conditions the site does not pose significant risk to public health, largely because contaminant levels detected in groundwater have stayed below the threshold that would threaten the river. What that assessment does not say is that no cleanup is warranted. It says the opposite: the absence of acute risk today doesn't settle the question of whether the waste needs to come out.

"Despite extensive cleanup efforts just across the street at the Highland Bridge redevelopment, Area C has remained largely untouched for decades," Friends of the Mississippi River's Colleen O'Connor Toberman wrote in a Star Tribune opinion piece this spring.

The Decision Still Sitting on MPCA's Desk in 2026

Ford submitted a feasibility study to the MPCA outlining six cleanup alternatives, ranging from doing nothing to a complete excavation of the site. The MPCA held a public comment period that closed February 3, 2026, following a community meeting on January 15 at the Highland Community Center that drew a rally outside before it even started.

The two options that matter are the ones on either end of the spectrum the agencies are actually weighing. The MPCA's preferred alternative, sometimes labeled Alternative 4, would remove waste that's near the surface, mostly along the pile's southern slope closest to Hidden Falls Park, install erosion controls, and leave the bulk of the buried material in place under ongoing monitoring. Ford estimates that option at $8.8 million. The alternative the St. Paul City Council voted unanimously to request, full excavation and off-site disposal, is estimated at $71 million.

The city council's February resolution asked the MPCA to require the full option, and it wasn't alone. Mayor Kaohly Her, state Rep. Dave Pinto, state Sen. Erin Murphy, and Rep. McCollum have all gone on record in favor of complete removal rather than the partial plan. Ford is legally obligated to cover whatever cost the MPCA settles on, which is part of why the choice matters beyond the neighborhood. The agency has said it plans to respond to public comments and issue a final selection sometime in 2026, with Ford developing an implementation plan afterward and beginning actual work in 2027.

Why the Distinction Matters If You're Looking at This Corridor

None of this touches the environmental status of a Highland Bridge home itself. That parcel cleared its cleanup requirements years before the first buyer closed. But if you're evaluating a property along Mississippi River Boulevard, near Hidden Falls Regional Park, or anywhere with a sightline to that stretch of bluff, you're looking at real estate whose immediate neighbor is an unresolved 22-acre environmental site with a state agency, a city council, an advocacy group, and a Fortune 500 automaker all still negotiating what happens to it.

That's not the same conversation as flood risk or school boundaries. It's closer to knowing whether a property backs up to an active quarry or sits near a rail yard slated for redevelopment: not a defect in the home, but a fact about its surroundings that a buyer should be able to ask about and get a straight answer to. The city's own Hidden Falls/Crosby Farm Regional Park Master Plan already anticipates folding Area C into the regional park system once contamination is addressed, which tells you the long-term trajectory even while the near-term timeline stays unsettled.

Here's what's worth asking before you write an offer on anything near this stretch:

• Is the property's environmental history limited to the Highland Bridge parcel, or does it border or overlook the separate Area C site?
• Has the seller or listing agent disclosed proximity to Area C, and do they understand the distinction between the two sites?
• What's the current status of the MPCA's cleanup decision at the time you're closing, given that the agency expects to finalize its choice sometime in 2026 with implementation starting in 2027?
• If you're weighing a river-view lot specifically for its outlook toward Hidden Falls Park, does that view currently include the fenced parking lot covering Area C, and is that expected to change on any near-term timeline?

What This Isn't

This isn't a reason to avoid Highland Park or the river bluff corridor. It's a reason to be precise about what "the Ford site was cleaned up" actually covers, because right now it covers less ground than the phrase implies. Buyers who ask specific questions get specific answers. Buyers who assume the whole area shares one clean bill of health are working from an incomplete picture, and in a market where a handful of blocks separate a fully remediated new-construction lot from a still-open regulatory file, incomplete pictures are exactly where surprises live.

A few distinct questions people ask:

Does Area C affect Highland Bridge property values? There's no public data tying the two together, and the sites have separate legal and cleanup histories. What buyers can reasonably do is factor proximity into their own due diligence the same way they would with any adjacent land use in transition.

When will the MPCA make its final decision? The agency has said it expects to select a cleanup alternative sometime in 2026, with Ford's implementation plan and actual work following in 2027. That timeline has already shifted once, so anyone closing on a nearby property this year should confirm the current status directly with the MPCA rather than relying on this or any other article.

Can I visit or see Area C? The site itself is fenced, but it's visible from several vantage points, including Hidden Falls Park, the Ford Parkway bridge, and parts of Minnehaha Park across the river in Minneapolis.

If you're weighing a property near this corridor, or anywhere else in Highland Park, Natasha Cejudo can walk through what's actually documented versus what's still in motion, so you're deciding with the full picture rather than the headline version. Let's connect. Start the conversation.