Making Room for Manufacturing: Understanding Industrial Land Conversion in Cities

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners face tension when dealing with the stock of urban industrial land: Should they enact industrial land preservation policies to protect viable manufacturers that provide good jobs even if it exacerbates the problem of affordable housing and causes cities to forgo growth in other sectors? Planners need better information on the underlying forces that lead to conversion of industrial land and an assessment of the effectiveness of preservation policies. We develop here an index of vulnerability of industrial land that is based on location factors, neighborhood dynamics, detailed industrial trends, environmental hazards, and local regulations. We show how these factors can explain the probability of the conversion of industrial land to other uses in Cook County (IL) and Mecklenburg County (NC) and describe how various industrial preservation polices are effective in limiting conversion. Takeaway for practice: Cities can use this index to strategically plan for industries to target and sites to preserve as industrial uses. Traditional planning and regulatory tools such as industrial zone designations do reduce conversion risk, while factors such as transit accessibility increase the probability of conversion. We argue that local governments should be strategic about which manufacturing industries can be preserved at what locations using these tools. We also develop and demonstrate an open source, interactive, web-based tool that demonstrates some of the key concepts that can be replicated in other places.