Industrial Port Strategy

A myriad of problems – including equipment shortages, labor strikes, maxed out volume of containers, and diminishing amount of real estate – at West Coast ports, namely LA/Long Beach, has forced companies to complement, or replace, their established West Coast logistics hubs with East Coast alternatives. This has been driving the recent land rush in East Coast port cities and subsequent development of speculative distribution centers.

In the Southeast, land is relatively much cheaper and much closer to the terminals where the containers are transferred, and the result is a favorable reduction in the cost of transportation and logistics-related activities in those areas. As the population centers of the South and East continue to grow, this fact is becoming even more evident. A growing population requires a growing number of goods, thereby necessitating more containers and the requisite real estate on which to build the distribution centers which process those containers.
 
JDA was one of the first speculative distribution center developers to recognize and act on this trend on a large scale. Several years ago, JDA began acquiring land in multiple port cities, from time-tested ports like Charleston to burgeoning ones like Mobile that recognized the trend and had begun making changes to their infrastructure by expanding roads, deepening their ship channels, increasing the amount of terminal space, and increasing their crane size and number to handle larger volumes.
 
While inland distribution hubs such as Spartanburg, Charlotte, Chicago, Des Moines, etc, will always be needed, ports represent a vital component in the transfer and processing of containers entering the country.