Matthew Tuerk

We got deep into it and really explored.

We formed something called the Urban Manufacturing Alliance in collaboration with San Francisco and the Pratt Institute in New York and our friends in the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation and in Detroit to just kind of bring cities who are interested in manufacturing together.

We started talking about reshoring or onshoring at that time, but it felt distant.

That fizzled out for sure.

So we did a reindustrialization strategy in 2014.

We worked with somebody to evaluate our total industrial stock.

I had at that point moved on to work for the Regional Economic Development Corporation, but was still involved with this Urban Manufacturing Alliance.

At the region, we could see that manufacturing was still important.

I had a better sense of what other types of manufacturing was occurring in the area.

We developed a strategy.

What I kept seeing at the region was that there is real demand to be in the Lehigh Valley and in these smaller footprint buildings.

So we saw inquiries all the time for buildings between 40,000 and 80,000 square feet of

but this is a time when we have values pivoting its economy toward transportation and warehousing building million square foot buildings with 24 to 36 foot ceilings uh really as this other technological trend of the ecom yeah started to show up this was the high demand for industrial space so we had lots of interest from small manufacturers particularly coming out of places like

Brooklyn, where maybe it was like not quite the place to be, who wanted to spread their arms a little bit and maybe have access to talent.

They were trying to be in the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't have a ton of building space to meet their needs.

So when we built that reindustrialization strategy, a big part of it was how do we

Position the built environment for this demand.

And some of that is, you know, rehabbing existing industrial buildings as surprise, surprise, industrial buildings.

So it's continued on from there.

Yeah, it's over 100 million, many more than 100 million people.