LPC Desert West, a division of Lincoln Property Co., has announced that it will develop a million-square-foot, Class A industrial warehouse and distribution site in the Tucson area.
I-10 International’s four new warehouse/distribution buildings will be located near Interstate 10 and the Tucson International Airport, all of which will be climate-controlled.
“This site has tremendous location advantages, being proximate to I-10, I-19 and Tucson International Airport, with direct connection to major ports and cities in the U.S. and Mexico,” Doug Klocke, vice president of Lincoln Property Co., said in a story July 1 on Tucson.com. “We (will) take full advantage of this location, which includes the ability to distribute product to 46 million people within a 500-mile radius.”
The project has been talked about for some time but was delayed due to the pandemic and recession.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Jesse Blum, an industrial specialist with Picor told the Arizona Daily Star.
Blum gave some credit to the efforts of Harsh Investment Properties, which gambled in 2018 when it built one of the first speculative industrial shell buildings in more than a decade.
“They acted like a bellwether for Tucson, and everyone was watching their first building to see if it would succeed,” Blum said. “They were early believers in Tucson and shouldered the risk of failure and proved their own theory of Tucson.”
Product demand, especially after the pandemic, helped speed-up the new plan.
“When Amazon pioneered that 8-to-12-hour delivery service — you can’t do that if things are in a warehouse in a different city,” Blum said. “Then the pandemic hit and perpetuated an online shopper that wouldn’t have done that in the past, i.e., the elderly who, for safety, had to purchase online and the industry was immediately fast-forwarded by 20 years.”
While serving the needs of the consumer is good and helping add convenience to the lives of Arizona shoppers is even better, Blum said, the best news of all is the investment in the Tucson community.
“There’s a huge sub-sect of our community that are proudly blue collar and they need jobs,” he said. “It’s dollars into the local economy.”
I-10 International also makes use of industrial land that wasn’t earmarked for other projects, Blum said.
“It’s a nice tax generating sector in areas that are considered to be blighted,” he said, “and that will never be used for housing.”