Land rush: Rust Belt towns turning into e-commerce hubs - YouTube

they were once home to giant industries  fueling the american dream. changing times  

brought changing fortunes. but now as lee cowan  explains, these towns are hot spots once again.

bethlehem steel. it cast a long shadow  over pennsylvania's lehigh valley.  

those are the blast furnaces. they remain even  though they went silent more than 20 years ago.  

when the mill closed it took a big chunk of the  region's high-paying blue-collar jobs with it. and  

the news at the time made it sound very final. the  mill workers call this making metal, and they've  

been making metal this way here in the valley for  almost 150 years. no more. but back then no one  

envisioned e-commerce. the demand for next or  even same day delivery has dumped huge challenges  

on the steps of brick and mortar stores. but  it has also created a demand at these huge  

job-hungry distribution centers. when people get  on their iphone and they order every imaginable  

product to show up at their doorstep, it's not  being brought there by magic. it takes quite  

frankly an army of people to do that. today there  are almost as many warehouse jobs in the region  

as there are manufacturing positions. that's a  big milestone, says don cunningham, president  

and chief executive at the lehigh valley economic  development corporation. from a purely economic  

standpoint, for high school diploma or less  workers, it's created something that quite frankly  

hasn't existed in this area since the days of  cement mills and slate quarries and steel mills.  

nationwide amazon alone has added more than 500  000 jobs just since 2020, making it the country's  

second largest private employer, just behind  walmart. most e-commerce warehouses also offer  

benefits and wages pushing 20 bucks an hour, which  effectively makes that the minimum wage, at least  

around here. we say anybody that wants a job,  there is a job for you in that sector. that said,  

susan larkin, vice president of allied personnel  services, warns that while the money may be  

good warehouse work can also be pretty grueling.  they look for warehouse athletes. that's a term?  

that's a term that they consider their employees  warehouse athletes, so you know going into that  

role it's going to be a physical job. long hours  with often rigid quotas make for a pretty high  

turnover rate in these jobs, but shortening supply  chains is now the name of the game with nearly  

all retailers competing for warehouse space all  over the country to fuel their own online sales.  

this is population density across the u.s. going  to layer on distribution centers over 250 000  

square feet. gosh it's everywhere isn't it? when  you break it down by market, you can see places  

like dallas, inland empire in southern california,  chicago and atlanta, we're seeing record spending.  

adrian ponsen analyzes industrial real estate  for a company called costar. he says all told,  

nearly two billion square feet of new warehouse  space has been built in this country in the last  

five years. that's equivalent to about 33 000  football fields worth of distribution centers.  

a recent amazon facility that was built on the  site of a former gm assembly plant in wilmington,  

delaware is the largest commercial structure  that's ever been built in delaware. we're at an  

inflection point, and we're fighting back. back in  the lehigh valley, county executive lamont mcclure  

met us in the middle of what he fears is now  in jeopardy, the region's rural character. we  

admire the folks who are working hard in these  warehouses, and we don't want their jobs to go  

away. what we're saying is we don't need any more.  you're done? we're done. he knows he can't match  

the deep pockets of a ups or a target, both  of which have a pretty big footprint here,  

but he's still trying. he spent 12 million dollars  of the county's money in the last four years  

buying up parcels of farmland in order to  preserve them from warehouse development,  

and in the process he hopes help clean up the air,  

too. it's dangerous and it's scary and our  folks have just had enough of the truck traffic.  

and noise. yes, there's a lot of air pollution  in the lehigh valley. this is main street,  

a two-lane road through historic downtown  bethlehem. trucks often use it to get to the  

nearby highway. that spike right there was just  from that big white 18-wheeler that just passed.  

breena holland is an associate professor at  lehigh university who's been measuring the  

amount of black carbon particles in the exhaust  from passing trucks. and here she says it's  

particularly concentrated. what we're trying to do  is measure lung level episodic exposure, so what  

people are exposed to on the street, just walking  by, when they're, when the trucks are driving by.  

still with all that increase in traffic does come  an increase in jobs. the lehigh valley is one of  

the few rust-belt areas to have actually grown  instead of dwindled. for don cunningham, that's  

a win. but this area knows perhaps better than  anywhere that even the best booms generally have  

a bust. life is an evolution and economies are  an evolution, and I think anybody who builds an  

academy thinking it's going to be that way forever  is a bit foolish. things are always changing.