James Forster of the Adrianople Group explores trends and best practices
in free zones around the world, and we rank the top U.S. Foreign-Trade
Zones and top states by FTZ impact.
These two metro areas lead all regions along the entire length of the
Ohio River in our annual analysis of corporate project tallie,
investment and job creation. They both have pretty good professional
soccer teams too.
All 192 pages of editorial content and valued advertiser messages is now
available via the Digital Edition of Site Selection’s November 2022
issue. In addition to the stories above, learn why foreign companies are
beating a path to the United States; discover how incentives are
evolving; gain insights into new projects and trends in India, the
Caribbean, South America and Germany; get the latest about huge projects
from Rivian and Intuitive Surgical in Georgia and the megaproject from
Micron in New York; and find out why two state are emerging as centers
of unmanned aerial systems excellence. Get quick-hitting summaries of
news in North American Reports and World Reports. And be sure to check
out state and area spotlights from Virginia, Nebraska, Kansas,
Mississippi, Washington and the Southwest U.S., as well as Investment
Profiles of San Joaquin and San Bernardino counties in California.
CONWAY DATA
SNAPSHOT
This map generated by Brookings’ research shows primary (orange), secondary
(yellow) and monocenters in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina.
Map courtesy of Brookings Metro
Last week, Brookings Institution’s Metro team released a new report on activity centers, defined as
“places within regions where economic, physical, social, and civic
assets cluster at a clearly defined hyperlocal scale.” Authors Tracy
Hadden Loh, DW Rowlands, Adie Tomer, Joseph Kane and Jennifer Vey mapped
them out across all 110 U.S. MSAs with at least 500,000 residents using
census block groups and identified five categories of assets that can
contribute to an area being an activity center: community, tourism,
consumption, institutional, and economic. The team then characterized
the census block groups as monocenters (lots of one kind of asset);
secondary centers (some of at least two kinds of assets); and primary
centers (lots of at least two kinds of assets). Among their findings:
Activity centers occupy just 3% of all land but are home to 40% of
all private-sector jobs on average (54.6% of business services
jobs). Density can vary: “Five metro areas (Las Vegas; Durham, North
Carolina; San Jose, California; San Diego, California; and Seattle,
Washington) have over half of their jobs located in activity
centers, while 12 metro areas have less than 30% of their jobs in
activity centers.” The report notes the role of high-concentration
areas such as Research Triangle Park and the Las Vegas Strip in
boosting these percentages so high.
Metro areas that concentrate jobs in activity centers are more
productive. “Every 1,000 jobs per square mile in a metro area’s
median activity center was associated with an additional $1,723 in
output per worker across the metro area.”
Activity centers have four times the commercial real estate assessed
value relative to developed land area. “For two-thirds of metro
areas, housing near activity centers is worth a weighted average of
26% more. In three high-growth metro areas (Raleigh, North Carolina;
Deltona, Florida; and the Washington, D.C. area) these housing
premiums exceed 50%.”
Most of us know about D.C.’s momentum, and the Research Triangle. But
Deltona? The largest city in Volusia County is located on Orlando’s
northeastern outskirts halfway to Daytona Beach along I-4, on the
northern shore of Lake Monroe. A $100 million, 500-job fulfillment
center from Amazon located there in 2020. Most of Volusia County project
activity tracked by Site Selection’s Conway Projects Database is taking
place outside Deltona proper. Those projects include a truck trailer
manufacturing site from Alcom and a manufacturing and processing
facility from cannabis and hemp product company Cookies Retail in
DeLand; a headquarters for Sparton Corp. (recently acquired by Elbit
Systems), a provider of sonobuoys and other engineered products for the
military, in DeLeon Springs; and investments in Daytona Beach from Brown
& Brown (600 jobs), Costa Inc. and Bloomio’s, among others. — Adam
Bruns
“The use of robotics and automation is growing at a
breathtaking speed,” Marina Bill, president of the
International Federation of Robotics, said as the IFR in
mid-October presented its World Robotics Report 2022 report.
In 2021 there was an all-time high of 517,385 industrial
robots installed in factories around the world, a
year-on-year growth rate of 31% that drove the stock of
operational robots around the globe to a new record of about
3.5 million units. Asia — where 74% of all newly deployed
robots were installed in 2021 (after 70% in 2020) — remains
the world’s largest market for industrial robots, with China
accounting for one out of every two industrial robots
installed globally.
PROJECT WATCH
South Dakota
Albany Farms located this ramen noodle manufacturing facility in the
heart of the country — literally. Belle Fourche, located northwest of
Rapid City in western South Dakota, is home to a marker denoting the
exact geographic center of the United States as determined by the
National Geodetic Survey. As far as Albany Farms is concerned, it’s
being in the center of the wheat that’s most important. As Lyle Rogalla,
an engineer with the company, told Agweek in July, the site sits “right
in the middle of 21,000 square miles of the very best wheat that grows
on the planet. The factory was formerly a site for the manufacture of
storage tanks. “I think we will be one of the larger, if not the
largest, ramen producing facilities in the country,” said Albany Farms
CEO Bill Saller of the site. “Anything that we possibly can source
locally, we will.”
Water heater and water treatment manufacturer A. O. Smith continues to
invest at its home campus in Tennessee — the same location hit hard by
floods in central Tennessee in 2010. (Read our 2011 story about successful recovery efforts in
the region.) Among the company’s recent investments at the site
was a $16.6 million new levee inaugurated in August to protect against
future floods. The 7,000-ft. berm, flood gates and pumping station
surround the plant, the city’s water treatment facility and the
Cumberland Electric Membership Corporation substation. The 20-month
project was the culmination of a 12-year collaboration among the U.S.
Army Corp of Engineers, the State of Tennessee, Tennessee Department of
Transportation, Cheatham County, town of Ashland City and A. O. Smith.
“This project is a prime example of one of our company’s values in
action — ‘A. O. Smith will be a good citizen’ — working to protect the
people who live and work in the city we’ve called home since 1961,” said
Dave Warren, president and general manager of the Company’s North
America Water Heating business. “This project was vital to the community
and our long-term sustainability in this town.”
A certain generation hears the words “Massey Hall” and thinks of Neil
Young’s landmark album created from two solo performances at the iconic
Toronto venue in January 1971. That album didn’t get released for 36
years. But the venerable Toronto building — founded and funded in the
1890s by Hart Massey of the Massey Ferguson manufacturing conglomerate
and referred to by some as “Canada’s Carnegie Hall” — has seen a lot of
folks come through before Neil and after him, hosting such luminaries as
Igor Stravinsky (1937), Oscar Peterson (1946), boxer Jack Dempsey (1919)
and the only performance ever by a legendary combo who called themselves
The Quintet: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus
and Max Roach. In 1920, 12 years after his Massey Hall debut, Enrico
Caruso sold out the hall and came out on the balcony to sing an aria for
those who could not gain admittance. So after 125 years, Massey was in
need of a C$184 million revitalization, which closed the venue for three
years until its grand reopening in November 2021.
Toronto-based architectural firm GBCA -Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd.
Architects, the project’s heritage consultant, was recently honored with
the Award of Excellence (Conservation – Architecture) from the Canadian
Association of Heritage Professionals; the Special Jury Award by the
Architecture Conservancy of Ontario; and the 2022 Crafts and Trades
Award from Heritage Toronto for its role in the overhaul, which included
restoration of close to 100 Art Nouveau-style stained glass windows
(many of them blocked off for years), the mid-20th-century neon sign out
front, and the interior’s plaster ceiling and Moorish arches. “We are
grateful to GBCA for the pivotal role they played in our restoration of
Massey Hall, one of the country’s most cherished heritage assets,
ensuring it will continue to make history one concert at a time for
future generations,” said Grant Troop, vice president of operations at
The Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall.
