A ‘Warehouse’ by Any Other Name – Next City

Without national requirements, or even guidance, cities are on their own for what to do with the burgeoning logistics industry. A few, such as Howell, in New Jersey, are taking the hard step of creating a definition in their zoning ordinances for these facilities to regulate them. Others are expanding their industrial zones to make room for them, perpetuating environmental injustices baked into their local zoning codes. But most, experts said, are not doing anything at all, allowing these mega-warehouses to be built based on outdated or inadequate zoning codes that dont account for the environmental impact of new e-commerce facilities.

In South Central Fresno, a community nestled in the middle of Californias San Joaquin Valley, residents discovered theyd been zoned out of their own homes years after it had happened. It surfaced in 2017 when a few neighbors sought approval to remodel their kitchens and sell their homes and learned that the city had quietly overhauled its zoning ordinance and classified the area as a heavy industrial district.

That same year, Fresnos mayor welcomed an 855,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center. Just like on the opposite side of the country, in Red Hook, the behemoth was approved as a warehouse, which in this case required a scant state-mandated environmental review to comply with air quality requirements. In 2018, the beauty conglomerate Ulta built another facility, spanning 670,000 square feet, just a mile down the road.

While residents lacked municipal water infrastructure, reliant instead on backyard wells, the new warehouses next door were able to get drinking and sewer water pumped in. In addition, some of the largest facilities can be shoved into a new type of zoning district meant to act as a buffer between the neighborhood and the citys heavy industrial area. How, residents argued, can a facility spreading across almost 1 million square feet be considered a light land use?

Just like in Red Hook, the answer was partially hiding in Fresnos zoning code. In making zoning decisions, the city looks at what happens inside and outside buildings to decide their environmental impacts. Warehouse types are determined by the kinds of products they store chemicals and minerals, industrial equipment, automobiles, feed, lumber, commercial goods. Warehouses that store goods sold via internet orders fall under the same category in Fresno as those that hold janitorial and restaurant supplies, despite the much higher traffic they generate.

A lot of decision-makers have minimized and even trivialized concerns about air quality impacts on people in order to justify moving forward with development proposals, said Ashley Werner, directing attorney at the local nonprofit Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. Its the particulate matter and benzene trail that heavy-duty trucks leave in the air, the smog and dust coating homes, the light spilling inside all night.

Flanked by three state highways, the 180, the 41 and the 99, the neighborhood already receives more 2.5-micrometer particulate matter pollution than 97 percent of the states counties, according to the California Environmental Protection Agency. When you look at the accumulative effects, it is just as impactful as a heavy-duty slaughterhouse, said Saunders, who works in community engagement at Leadership Counsel.

Katie Taylor lives across the street from the Amazon fulfillment center. The trucks shake her home constantly, their engines rumbling all hours of the day and night, sometimes so loud that it sounds like someone is knocking at my door, she wrote in a letter to the city council. The lights across the street are bright enough to disrupt her sleep and the constant flashing from traffic lights has left her daughter, who has Down syndrome and autism, particularly anxious.

For Yesenia Lpez Lpez, who arrived in Fresno 15 years ago from Mexico, the worst thing about the buildings is the additional traffic. Before, it was quieter, like living on a farm, she said. Now, there are people and cars all the time. Before Ulta built its facility, which Lpez Lpez can see from her home, shed never been involved in a car accident in her neighborhood. Last year, she was hit by cars twice while leaving for work before dawn.

Construction proceeds on an 1.4 million-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center along Interstate 4 in Deltona, Florida in 2020. (Photo by Paul Hennessy / NurPhoto via Getty Images; reprinted courtesy of Grist)

The perpetual flow of vehicles has also damaged the communitys already cracked and dusty streets, and the neighborhood has lost its sole recreational space: an unpaved strip running along the street where the last-mile facilities are popping up. We used to go out with the neighbors, the elderly, Lpez said. The ladies with their husbands went to exercise, we walked or rode bikes. We cant go out there much anymore.

In 2019, advocates and residents stopped a 2-million-square-foot industrial park, with seven massive warehouses, from taking root next to the Amazon facility. But developers didnt give up, and another company applied to build a 420,000-square-foot facility to expand Amazons center.

About two dozen residents, some of them represented by Leadership Counsel, pushed to be heard in the planning process. After two months of talks, residents struck a deal with developers and the city, requiring paved sidewalks, safe pedestrian crossings, and up to $10,000 dollars for each affected family so they can double-proof their windows, install air filtering systems, and basically fortify their homes in any way you can when you have heavy-duty trucks passing less than 30 feet in front of you, Saunders said.

Residents and advocates also managed to convince the city to re-evaluate its 2014 overhaul of the zoning code. Under the proposal, homes and several religious buildings will go back to being classified as residential and public use. But even if it is accepted, people in South Central Fresno will remain surrounded by industrial plots.

This one-by-one approach has left community advocates and activists exhausted, said Werner. Instead, they are challenging the environmental review of the citys new zoning ordinance, which didnt analyze the environmental impacts of the new fulfillment centers. For Werner, an accurate definition of e-commerce facilities in Fresnos zoning code is useless if the city doesnt address the bigger picture: how through zoning, cities and counties are routinely directing noxious land uses to communities of color without protecting them. Today, the 97,000 people living in central, southeast and southwest Fresno areas with the lowest incomes and highest densities of industrial activity are 67 percent Latino, 23 percent Black and Asian combined, and only 8 percent white. In contrast, more than half of residents in Fresnos affluent areas are white. Fresnos Planning Commission did not respond to Grists request for comment.

No matter what the economic development trend is at the time, the most impactful harmful uses always go to these neighborhoods, Werner said. Thats not just a fact of nature. Thats intentional. And its by design. A solution needs to target the underlying biases and be comprehensive, she said.

One hundred and ten miles north of Fresno, a small Northern California community called Morgan Hill might have a solution.

The rumors first appeared on Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media platform for neighbors to connect. In May 2019, a user posted an aerial shot of Morgan Hills city limits with the message: Urgent alert!!! Horrible project on the way! The post then explained that a developer called Trammell Crow planned to build a 1.1-million-square-foot technology park that, by all accounts, looked a lot like an e-commerce distribution center.

The building would stand 55 feet tall, have 199 docks to load and unload goods, and 752 parking spaces for workers. The site would be placed near a high school, a senior living community, and a health center. A small group of residents came together as the Morgan Hill Responsible Growth Coalition, or MHRGC. For months, they handed out flyers, sent emails, and went door-to-door to inform the community about the project. By October, hundreds of concerned residents showed up to an in-person city Planning Commission meeting where developers were presenting their designs.

At the heart of the discussion was the citys zoning code definition of a warehouse, adopted in 2018. Its very broad. Its very vague. It enables a lot of interpretation, Jennifer Carman, who works at the planning department, said 13 minutes into the meeting. Then, looking directly at the commissioners, she explained: Our zoning ordinance does not define a fulfillment center at this time. Should it be regulated differently than a warehouse and distribution and, or, be prohibited?

For nearly three hours, dozens of people spoke in front of the commission against the project. In the months that followed, the pressure kept mounting. In October 2020, the Morgan Hill City Council approved an amendment presented by the planning commission that included new definitions for fulfillment centers and parcel hubs.

A bicycle station stands near Mission Bay Kids Park in Morgan Hill, California in 2019. (Photo by Josie Norris / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images; reprinted courtesy of Grist)

The council defined a fulfillment center as a building with a minimum of 100,00 square feet, 24 feet tall, and where e-commerce products are stored and distributed either to consumers or through a parcel hub, the last step in the e-commerce distribution network or the so-called last-mile facilities. Not only did they define the new land uses they effectively banned fulfillment centers from Morgan Hill. Council members kept working with the Morgan Hill Responsible Growth Coalition and in April 2021, they enacted even stricter definitions: prohibiting buildings bigger than 75,000 square feet; 34-foot-high ceilings over more than 25 percent of the building; and more than one dock-high door per 25,000 square feet.

Closer to New York City, several municipalities are trying to pass similar changes addressing zoning loopholes. Howell, New Jerseys town council recently approved an ordinance that separates warehouses defined as facilities involved in short to long-term storage of bulk materials and products and distributed in bulk with little to no material repackaging, repurposing, or breakup and fulfillment centers, places that receive, store, separate, and distribute products to individual consumers.

Experts, however, argue that while changing definitions is vital to fixing the inequities baked into zoning codes, its not a silver bullet. Such changes wont address the pollution that communities are already experiencing from existing e-commerce facilities and other polluting industries close to their neighborhoods. They point to the Inland Empire, an area encompassing Riverside and San Bernardino counties close to the Los Angeles Port, where e-commerce warehouses arrived 20 years ago.

Last May, Californias South Coast Air Quality Management District approved the first legislation in the country regulating the indirect sources of pollution trucks and cars generated by the giant warehouse facilities. The legislation requires that warehouses and fulfillment centers larger than 100,000 square feet encompassing about 3,000 facilities in Southern California report their pollution impact to the air district, which then scores each facilitys impact. Those companies that score high impact numbers can then pick from a list of mitigating options to improve their ratings, like electrifying part of their fleet or installing solar panels. If they dont want to comply or cant reach zero, they can pay a fee that will help to clean up communities.

Bautista, from the NYC-EJA, said many frontline communities dont oppose all industrial activity, as a certain level keeps property prices low shielding neighborhoods from further gentrification. In Red Hook, this is particularly urgent. Ten years ago, Superstorm Sandy completely altered the neighborhoods makeup. As longtime residents who were unable to fix their homes left, wealthier people came in, driving up housing prices. Developers started paying attention, envisioning a similar fate as other waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Red Hook soon became one of Brooklyns most expensive areas to buy new property.

What these waterfront neighborhoods really want is to be job centers in the new economy of the Green New Deal, Thaddeus Pawlowski, an urban planner and resiliency expert at Columbia University, said during a panel discussion about the sprawl of e-commerce facilities in the neighborhood.

Bautista dreams of blue-collar jobs to build the wind turbines needed for one of the countrys largest offshore wind projects, slated for Long Island Sound. But the distribution center crisis has shown him that growth has to be done carefully. Thats part of the reason why NYC-EJA, Earthjustice, city assembly member Marcela Mitaynes, and the grassroots organizations UPROSE and The Point CDC launched a coalition urging the city to include a definition of last-mile trucking facilities in the zoning code based on size and the number of vehicle trips per day.

We would like to see a definition or special category made for e-commerce facilities, which would allow for special permitting, public review, and/or extra mitigation, said Disa, from Earthjustice. Ideally, the amendment would define last-mile trucking facilities based on size and the number of vehicle trips per day, allowing regulators and communities to fully understand the impacts.

Rebecca Weintraub, spokesperson for New York Citys Department of City Planning told Grist that the department is currently working with several city agencies, including the departments of transportation and health, to better understand where e-commerce distribution centers are locating, and even congregating, and their effects on the health of surrounding neighborhoods. She did not specify if there are plans to review zoning regulations in the city.

Bautista remembers what it was like growing up in Red Hook in the 1970s and 80s. The citys bankruptcy left renovation of the neighborhoods sewer system unfinished for months. A building in his block fell from lack of maintenance, killing a man and his daughter. In the following decades, Bautista spearheaded the fights trying to keep power plants and other industrial activities away from the community. Red Hook eventually won a defining battle against a waste transfer station slated for next to one of the neighborhoods largest parks.

Today, a 311,796-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center is being constructed in that same spot. For Bautista, that reality is bittersweet.

You know, I didnt win that fight just so Amazon or Ikea or whatever companies could build warehouses, he said.

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A 'Warehouse' by Any Other Name - Next City