Why Warehouses Are Getting Taller
The Logistics Quarterly · March
For most of the past century the distribution warehouse was a low, sprawling structure, and for good reason: floor space was cheap and forklifts do not climb. — [1] —. That calculation is now being revised. In Rotterdam, Singapore and increasingly in the industrial corridors outside major North American cities, developers are erecting distribution centres of three, four and even six storeys.
The immediate driver is land. — [2] —. Warehousing has followed consumers into the urban fringe, where a hectare now costs several times what it did a decade ago. Building upward has ceased to be an extravagance and become the only way to make the arithmetic work.
Automation has made it feasible. Vertical lifts and robotic shuttles move goods between floors without the spiral ramps that once consumed a quarter of a multi-storey building's footprint. — [3] —. What remains contested is whether the savings justify a construction cost that runs roughly 40 percent above that of a conventional shed.
Sceptics observe that the tallest facilities have so far appeared only in markets where land is unusually constrained. — [4] —. Their argument is not that the model fails, but that it travels poorly. For the moment the evidence favours neither camp decisively.