Giant Warehouses Dot Phoenix Desert Awaiting Imports That Never Came
The Wall Street Journal reports: Along a 15-mile stretch of desert, amid strip malls and unfinished subdivisions, nearly a dozen giant warehouses sit silent and empty. They are relics of this city's dream of becoming a national warehouse hub, a vision dashed by plunging imports and a reordering of the nation's biggest ports.
Decisions to site these warehouses were made earlier this decade as Americans were buying so many new cars, televisions and T-shirts that California -- the gateway for many Asian imports -- was running out of cheap storage space. With cash from pension funds and other investors, developers sought to turn the desert on the city's west side into a distribution hub, 370 miles from Los Angeles ports.
Today, an empty, half-mile-long warehouse lingers from that vision. The building's 1.2 million square feet could fit 193 full-size copies of the Statue of Liberty. Its parking lot has room for 292 tractor trailers. But on a recent morning the only signs of life were a security guard's trailer, golf cart and bicycle.
New warehouses also sprang up in, among other places, California's Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. In total, U.S. developers built more industrial real estate during the boom than office buildings or retail space, as measured by square footage.
Feeding the commercial space boom were publicly traded real-estate investments trusts and private-equity funds that funneled cash from pension funds, endowments and other investors.
From 2001 through 2008, some $5.6 billion in industrial property deals were done here, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc.
View the full article on The Wall Street Journal: Giant Warehouses Dot Phoenix Desert Awaiting Imports That Never Came
Posted by: Nina Turner