Logistics Sprawl and Urban Freight Planning Issues in a Major Gateway City - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 56

3.3 The ''Warehousizing'' of Los Angeles

As we shall see in Sect. 3 , the number of warehouses in Los Angeles seems to be
increasing very rapidly, by 200 % over the past ten years, as calculated using the
NAICS 7 code 493 (''warehouses''). As we have seen in Sect. 1 , there is evidence
for similar growth in other large metropolitan areas around the US. We can suggest
several explanations for this change. Some warehousing activities which were
previously performed as part of a manufacturing or distribution activity (and on the
same premises), have been outsourced to logistics providers, automatically
increasing the number of warehouses. In some cases business owners have gained
a specific warehousing/logistics facility when previously they used to perform
logistics tasks (which required less time and space) within the manufacturing
facility itself. In other cases new warehousing activities, demanded by today's
import-based economy, were added en masse to the metropolitan areas that could
provide the workforce, the infrastructure, the connection to freight gateways and
had the necessary available land.
For the purpose of clarification and to try to quantify these varied potential
factors, I conducted a detailed study of the increase in warehousing/logistics
activities by comparing the business listings of the city of Vernon between 2002
and 2011. Vernon is an interesting case of urban manufacturing/logistics activities
within the Los Angeles area (see Sect. 4 ). The Vernon business listings I surveyed
provide two pieces of information annually for each individual business located in
Vernon: the ''Business Type'' and the ''SIC code'' (the SIC being the national
Standard Industrial Classification). 8 This analysis gives the following results. The
number of businesses located in Vernon remained almost the same between 2002
and 2011 (1598 in 2002 and 1584 in 2011), but these businesses have changed in
nature, and the importance of logistics/warehousing activities has increased at the
expense of manufacturing. In Table 2 , the second column shows the rate of growth
for a sample 9 of business types from 2002 to 2011. The third column shows the
change in the percentage of businesses whose activity is classified as ''ware-
housing'' in the SIC. 10
The number of businesses classified as (unspecified) warehouses has not
increased much in Vernon since 2002 (by 8 %—from 158 to 170 businesses), but
specialized warehouses have increased a great deal (Garment Warehouses by
1150 %, General Merchandise Warehouses by 124 %). At the same time also, the

7 North American Industry Classification System.
8 The NAICS replaced the SIC in 1997 to take better account of new and expanding industries.
Correspondence tables between SIC and NAICS exist. The city of Vernon's business listings
continue to use the SIC coding system.
9 I have selected 20 business types out of a total of 128 in the databases. These 20 types selected
are those more obviously dealing with warehousing and distribution activities.
10

General Warehousing and Storage, Refrigerated Warehousing and Storage, Special

Warehousing and Storage, Not Elsewhere Classified.