The Linden Logistics Center, a 4-million-square-foot, 8-building industrial park that is nearly fully built, will create approximately 3,000 permanent jobs while turning a long-vacated area into one of the largest property tax revenue providers for the Union County municipality.
Even more, because of the efforts of Greek Real Estate Partners, the site – which had been shut down for four decades due to environmental contamination – has now been fully remediated at no cost to the city.
Amazingly, this is not unique to New Jersey. There are sites like this all over the state – economic and environmental success stories. Win-wins in every sense of the phrase.
One might assume that developers doing this type of work would be celebrated. They are not. More often, they are castigated as agents of destruction of the municipalities they serve. It’s part of a trend that sees all members of the logistics community – just ask the truckers – being criticized, despite being in perhaps the fastest growing sector in the state, one that is estimated to contribute $62.5 billion (or 10%) to New Jersey’s overall GDP.
David Greek, the managing partner and third-generation leader of Greek Real Estate Partners, can only shake his head and wonder why.
“We have been doing this for quite a long time, so I know there’s always been some natural public pushback to any sort of development – that’s par for the course in being a developer,” he said.
“So, it’s not surprising. But, particularly with industrial, there’s a lack of understanding of both the business and how it impacts communities, and how everyday people interact with it, and how it impacts their lives. That’s what is frustrating.”
Want more? This frustration comes on the heels of the pandemic, when those in supply-chain and distribution sectors were considered heroes.
“It was exciting to see that growth in public awareness of our industry during COVID, which showed the importance of what we do,” he said. “That has been forgotten.”
Greek and others are trying to bring it back.
Greek is serving as the inaugural chair of Circulate NJ, a coalition of more than three dozen members of the logistics industry that aims to start an education campaign to promote public understanding of the numerous benefits that logistics brings to New Jersey’s economy, environment and workforce.
Greek recently spoke with ROI-NJ; here is more of the interview, edited for space and clarity.
ROI-NJ: Give us your elevator speech on Circulate NJ?
David Greek: Circulate NJ is an assembly of real estate owners, developers, truckers, warehousers, distributors – a broad array of people involved in the logistics and distribution industry in New Jersey. The purpose of the organization is to help balance the public narrative on industrial and the benefits of industrial.
We have seen a large increase in the number of negative perceptions of our industry and negative articles about the impacts of our industry, particularly on trucking and the development of new warehouses. There was increasing frustration from our industry members that a lot of the good that we’ve been doing for the state, for the community, for the environment, is being drowned out by a combination of negative messaging and misinformation.
So, we thought it was time for us to start trying to shape that narrative a little bit ourselves and put some effort into making sure that the public is aware of all of the benefits that we bring to the state.
ROI: Talk about the messaging – what are some key points?
DG: It starts with the importance of our industry to the state’s economy. First and foremost, it’s one of the largest employment segments in New Jersey (it supports 400,000 jobs). For the last four years, it has been the fastest growing in terms of jobs created in the state. It has been very important in keeping people employed in good jobs while our economy shifts and adapts.
And these are good jobs. We have many highly educated, highly compensated people working in our facilities. The average wage within these facilities ($75,000) is significantly higher than most of the other competing jobs that that this type of labor would compete for.
ROI: It sounds as if you treat those involved well?
DG: We, as developers, as well as our tenants and occupiers, pay a lot of attention to the quality of life of the workers within the spaces. That has been a major shift in our industry.
One of the impacts of eCommerce on industrial is not just the need to build more industrial, but the type and amount of staffing that goes into the facilities. And due to the amount that’s been built here, and the number of people hired in the industry, it is a very competitive staffing environment within the logistics industry.
People think you’re bringing unskilled labor into a warehouse in our town. It’s really not the case anymore.
ROI: Considering the impact of eCommerce in the state, these jobs seem like they will be here for generations?
DG: Exactly. Think a little bit about what’s happened to the American worker over the last 30-40 years. A lot of our manufacturing is no longer here. A lot of those workers have had to adjust and pivot to other types of work, and the most common place for them to land is retail work, which tends not to be very permanent, and tends not to come with great benefits or great pay.
So, compared to the common alternative for workers that are re-skilling or re-retraining into other industries, working in one of our facilities is a very good career pivot.
ROI: Of course, the economic benefits go beyond the workers – and even the tax revenue for the town? Talk about the greater impact.
DG: Look at our Linden Park and the ripples in the pond of the economy of making such a large investment. When you bring so much new activity to an area that has been vacant for so long, it will completely transform the area that it’s in. There are a number of small businesses around it that are seeing a huge increase in the number of customers on a daily basis, just by nature of the number of jobs we’re bringing in.
One of the things that people focus on is the permanent jobs that we create within the facilities we build – and that’s important. But there are thousands of construction workers that have worked on the Linden project that we’ve hired directly. The amount of economic activity that flows through that park today will create lots and lots of other jobs that we won’t be directly responsible for – but are the direct result of our project.
ROI: Not to mention the environmental impact? How important are the remediation efforts of the industry in a state that still needs plenty of remediation?
DG: Environmental remediation often only happens through industrial redevelopment because we are the only ones who can afford to do it. And we often are the only ones that it makes sense to do it. Not all these sites can be turned into residences or public parks – some can only be something like an industrial site.
That’s why the Linden site sat vacant for so long. There wasn’t a use at that time that could justify the cost of the cleanup industrial, despite being so important to the economy there. And because industrial has become such a critical part of the state’s infrastructure, the values in our sector have increased to a point where we can afford to clean up sites that were previously untouchable.
We’ve also become much more sophisticated as a real estate community in recognizing these problems and learning how to clean them up. If an industrial development had not been placed in Linden, it would likely still be vacant land not producing any tax revenue or jobs for the town.
ROI: We’ll admit; we didn’t know a lot of this information. So, we can understand why Circulate NJ was created. Tell us how it will work?
DG: We’re going to use a variety of messaging platforms. First off, word of mouth, and through outlets like ROI, where we’re looking to organically spread this message. We’ve teamed up with the communications firm Avoq, to lead our PR efforts.
ROI: This targets citizens, will you make an effort to reach legislators, too.
DG: Not really. And just to be clear, this is not a lobbying group. We are not lobbying for public policy. We are not targeting legislators. This is a messaging campaign.
We want to be talking to the citizens of New Jersey, because every single one of them is impacted by our industry in some way and has some opinion on it. That’s really our target audience. We will be using social media advertising – because that is where a lot of the negative messaging has originated, and a lot of the kind of misinformation about our projects and our industry spreads – and any other platform where we feel we can get our message across.
We know the value of our sector: The goal is to share that knowledge.
