It’s not “warehouse space” so much as land. The scarcity has always been there: now would be a good time for cities to take advantage of it…
Logistics firms are taking several steps to deal with the scarcity of storage space, like signing deals for new space long before ground is broken and expanding searches for sites farther from coastal ports, to such areas as Knoxville, Tenn.; the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania; and Reno, Nev.
They are also reimagining the commercial warehouse space they already occupy. And in densely populated areas where land is scarce and zoning restrictive, they are vying to build taller warehouses or spread their goods to smaller spaces such as vacant storefronts that were shuttered during the pandemic.
And this should not be possible: ground rents/land value taxes would prevent stockpiling or hoarding undeveloped or unused land.
Adding to the space crunch, companies aren’t just amassing goods for future sales, they are also stockpiling warehouse space when they can, even if they aren’t yet able to fill it, said Greg Sanguinetti, president of Pro Group Logistics in Sparks, Nev.
“But if it costs too much, people won’t build there…” Of course, they won’t, if it costs too much: the problem we have here is that it costs too little and speculators are taking the profits. Either the location is worth building on or not.
But city officials and the budget/finance people who advise them see land values as some kind of natural force, like weather, to be endured and dressed for, rather than managed. Similar to traffic. On the one hand, you might feel like a city has arrived when it has a traffic reporter but on the other, you have someone whose job it is to monitor the daily waste of people’s time and the resulting environmental damage from a man-made problem, entirely preventable.