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Industrial Realty Group (IRG), the developer and owner founded by Stuart Lichter that has turned around one former large industrial site after another, this summer announced that its tenant SLB, the energy technology company formerly known as Schlumberger, has further expanded its operations at IRG’s Shreveport Business Park campus. “Shreveport has become a strategic hub for our expanding role in the hyperscaler ecosystem,” SLB Data Centers Director Andrew Johnston said in December when an $18 million expansion was announced.
“SLB has expanded various times since first establishing its presence at the property in 2023,” IRG stated in its June release. “With this latest expansion, SLB will occupy a total of 3.1 million square feet, taking the balance of the remaining space at the former General Motors plant.”
That plant closed in 2012. Today, the 3.5-million-sq.-ft. industrial site is home to operations from USPS, Hyundai Glovis and SLB. “By 2027, an estimated 1,400 employees will work at Shreveport Business Park, well surpassing the approximately 800 employees working there at the time of GM’s 2012 closure,” IRG continued.
“IRG is continuing its record of success in the transformation of underutilized industrial properties for job-creating reuse with this milestone in the redevelopment of the former GM plant,” said Elliott P. Laws, administrative trustee of RACER Trust, which assumed ownership following the GM closure. (See the 2012 story “Further Action” for the first of several Site Selection stories over the ensuing years documenting the trust’s successful efforts with former GM properties.)
“RACER and its predecessor, Motors Liquidation Company, along with Louisiana Economic Development (LED) and Northern Louisiana Economic Partnership (NLEP), aggressively marketed the Shreveport property to prospects globally,” IRG explains. “RACER vetted more than 50 prospects before concluding a series of transactions, with the consent of Caddo Parish, LED and NLEP, resulting in selling the plant to the Caddo Parish Industrial Development Board, subject to a lease of the entire plant to IRG. Since then, IRG has purchased the property and with the help of LED, NLEP, Caddo Parish, the City of Shreveport and other supporters, brought the site to production once again.”
“Few industrial redevelopment projects demonstrate the impact of adaptive reuse more clearly than this campus,” Lichter said.
Not all reuse attempts succeed. In the July 2013 story “Next Generation,” we reported on a quixotic attempt at the just-closed GM Shreveport site from Elio Motors, whose founder Paul Elio touted a three-wheeled car that would get 84 miles per gallon and cost just $6,800. Stuart Lichter was among his advisors, he told us. At Elio’s previous firm, ESG Engineering, not all projects worked out in the end, but “all of that experience has prepared me for this journey,” Elio said. After struggles raising money, Elio Motors in 2021 tried to resuscitate its fortunes with an electric model, but the company’s journey today appears “effectively defunct,” as one observer put it, as it has never achieved commercial production and allowed its web presence to expire. — Adam Bruns
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