David Harrison of The Wall Street Journal reports that as e-commerce soared, warehousing jobs in San Joaquin County surged, too. Did the area bet too heavily on one industry? Harrison writes:
The e-commerce boom didn’t just change consumers’ lives, it transformed entire regions, turning backwaters into logistics-driven boomtowns. Now, some of those regions confront an uncomfortable question: What do you do when the boom ends?
Nowhere is that question more pressing than in San Joaquin County in California’s Central Valley. A decade ago it had one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. Many of its workers relied on seasonal agricultural jobs. Relatively few had college degrees.
Everything changed when Amazon.com opened its first warehouse in 2013. It touched off a land rush, with major retailers vying for space to fill online orders from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Transportation and warehousing employment in the region more than tripled in the decade to December 2022, accounting for 44% of total job growth in the metropolitan area around Stockton, San Joaquin County’s largest city. […]
“You can bring up Detroit,” said Robert Rickman, another supervisor. “Detroit was a city that was just cars, right? Where is Detroit nowadays?”
In the end, supervisors punted: They instructed staffers to monitor the industrial real-estate market and report back occasionally.
Read more here.
