Has the tide turned in battle over warehouses?

As more municipalities are starting to restrict them, is being the 'storage close of the Northeast' a blessing or a curse?

In one corner of Lower Macungie Township sits a group of large industrial buildings, including Uline's East Coast Distribution Center, a 930,000-square-foot mega warehouse that opened in September.

Driving around the township, which features a mixture of suburban and rural areas, you may notice that these huge buildings are, for the most part, limited to the area around Spring Creek Road, just off Route 100.

As the number of warehouses have increased exponentially over the years in the Lehigh Valley, many residents have grown tired of the destruction of green space and the increased number of trucks tearing up the roads. In 2017, Lower Macungie started rewriting its zoning to greatly restrict where they can be built.

It's a trend that may be picking up steam in the Valley. Recently, Lower Nazareth Township was the first of what will likely be a group of 10 municipalities in Northampton County to explicitly ban future construction of warehouses in its light industrial campus zoning district. The same week, neighboring Moore Township rejected two warehouses that would be built at Southmoore Golf Club.

Ron W. Beitler helped lead the fight against the buildings as a citizen, then as a member of Lower Macungie's Board of Commissioners. He's currently a Lehigh County commissioner and continues to fight for smart growth policies for a larger area.

“The writing has been on the wall for the Lehigh Valley for decades,” Beitler said. “Of course we all know why, because we're at the confluence of several major highways and I-78 was built in our geographic location, which is a blessing and a curse. We're the storage closet of the Northeast.

“Communities are either prepared for this type of development and able to guide them to appropriate locations, which is directly off highway interchanges,” Beitler said, “or they're going to come into places that's going to wreck a lot of havoc.”

Under state law, municipalities must provide a place for every possible land use, though things like warehouses can be restricted to only one part of a township or borough. But if warehouses are allowed in a zoned area, there's little township officials can do to stop a proposal.

Lower Macungie's ability to restrict the warehouses to a corner of the township and keep them there turned out to be a sign of things to come. Lehigh Township in 2019 removed warehouses as a byright use in the neighborhood and general commercial zoning districts and limited them only to the industrial zones by conditional use.

“I think we did get ahead of the problem as much as we could,” Beitler said. “And I was very happy of course to see other communities like Lower Nazareth and Moore get on the ball as well.”

Warehouses already approved could still be built in the restricted areas, but there will be no more after that. Companies seeking warehouse space in Lower Nazareth in the future would have to look in areas zoned general industrial, which has limited space.

“That means we have our fair share,” township Solicitor Gary Asteak said. “We have enough.”

`Not inherently evil'

Lower Nazareth's lead is expected to soon be followed by other members of the Nazareth Area Council of Governments.

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure applauded the township's move and coordination between the local governments in the COG.

“Warehouses are not inherently evil,” McClure said. “Lots of good people have jobs in them and the dignity of that work needs to be respected. But with that being said, we don't need any more warehouses in Northampton County.

“And I think what these comprehensive plans that they're doing regionally either in the , or hopefully in the Slate Belt Council of Governments are going to be able to properly zone where these developments should go. And they'll be able to have their industrial zones and that's where they'll be properly sited.”

The buildings, though, are still coming.

In its latest numbers, commercial real estate company CBRE reported that Northampton County had 48.2 million square feet of industrial building space with a 5% vacancy rate and 4.7 million square feet under construction in the fourth quarter of 2022. Net absorption — the sum of square feet occupied, minus the vacant square feet — is 5.1 million square feet.