Lansing- Mayor David Hollister and Combined Van Lines Inc. officially began construction Tuesday on the company’s new home.

Combined Van Lines already maintains two facilities in the state capital, but will consolidate its operations in a 31,000-square-foot facility to be built on a vacant site at the end of Seager Street.

The site, a brownfield, has been vacant for more than 40 years because of slag from nearby railroad tracks. Slag, a type of cooked metal, contaminated the site with arsenic, but the contamination will be cleaned up during construction.

“Ten years ago, if somebody said brownfield site, anybody associated with it would just run,” said Rich Hoekstra, construction manager for the site. “They wouldn’t stay anywhere near it at all, there were so many regulations that didn’t make sense.”

Now the city is taking an increased role in offering brownfields to companies as development sites.

The city has identified nearly 100 brownfields to be developed as a result of the city’s industrial history, Hollister said.

“You take an old industrial city like Lansing, which is a manufacturing center, you don’t have a lot of open green space, and what you do have is parkland, and people want to preserve it,” he said. “So in a city like Lansing