If you just want cash and want to do no work, you could ground lease the land to someone for a very long time and they put a building on it. However, a lot of people will not want to invest capital in a ground lease.
Real estate brokers will tell you a long term ground lease is basically the same thing as fee. I've read the ground leases and disagree. I really dislike it when my company does ground lease deals. It just makes me leery when we pour millions of dollars into something and someone can go sue us to take it away if they don't like us. In reality, I know none of the ground landlords gives a crap if the checks keep coming, but there are often other default scenarios listed in the ground lease. Also, if there is a temporary liquidity crunch you could lose the value of your improvements because you were short on cash for a while! You could try to "sell" your ground lease interest, but I suspect the market for distressed ground lease interests are not very liquid. So, it's always been my opinion that the "unsophisticated common sense" opinion of not liking ground leases is in fact reasonable.
Another thing you could do is sell the land. Then you get cash.
Things like gas stations and dry cleaner facilities come with environmental risk. So you can make a lot of money if you want to take the risk, then it will hurt future resale. But I am guessing a gas station company WILL actually be happy to do a ground lease and put up the station themselves. They're probably HAPPY not to the own the land, in case there are issues.
You can probably get an appraiser to do a market study based on different types of uses. So, you may want to do that before throwing down serious cash.
Developing real estate takes a LONG TIME and a LOT OF MONEY. It's not for the faint of heart. This is why it's increasingly done by big corporations or really, really rich people, and people like me just serve them because we only have a little bit of money.
