An eerie quiet may descend on some Eugene-Springfield industrial areas as more manufacturers close up shop and move jobs away.
The latest closures — Bowtech in Eugene, Pacific Headwear in Coburg and True Value in Springfield — are wrenching for the nearly 200 workers in the process of being laid off. And they further glut a market already laden with big empty industrial buildings, some constructed by optimistic investors in the economic euphoria of the 1990s-2000s.
The soon-to-be-vacated True Value regional hardware products distribution center on Olympic Street is a behemoth. At 520,000 square feet, it is the second-largest industrial building in Lane County. The top honor goes to the million-square-foot former Hynix factory in west Eugene, which remains largely unused nearly 20 years after Hynix exited the city.
Whether anyone steps in to repurpose these buildings — and bring new jobs — is a pressing question.
The latest job losses continue a decades-long erosion of manufacturing, warehousing and similar employment in the county.
Lane County’s manufacturing sector is down by nearly 1,000 jobs from just before the 2020 onset of COVID, and down by 7,000 since the sector’s heyday in 2006, state data show.
Because of their size and employee mix, Bowtech, Pacific Headwear and True Value all had to file state-mandated mass-layoff Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications. “Most companies are not required to file a WARN notice, so there may be (layoffs) we are missing,” says Henry Fields, the state’s regional economist for Lane County.
But, he adds, compared to the losses in the 2008 recession, the current cuts are “quite muted.”
Fast wins
The growing roster of empty industrial properties has an upside: Businesses scouting Lane County have plenty to choose from.
“These buildings are the region’s fastest potential wins,” says Matt Sayre, executive director of Collaborative Economic Development Oregon, the county’s main business recruitment agency.
A vacant building like the True Value property “with utilities already in the ground, is faster and cheaper to occupy than any greenfield site,” he says. “Much of our remaining undeveloped industrial land needs years of infrastructure and permitting work before it can compete” to attract businesses, he says.
Here’s a look at the new additions to the vacancy list:
• The True Value building is a single-story 30-foot-high concrete affair nearly a quarter of a mile long with a score of loading docks facing Olympic. Built in 1974, the property has long been owned by New York real estate investment giant W.P. Carey Inc. It’s not yet listed for sale or lease. W.P. Carey didn’t respond to messages from Eugene Weekly.
• In coming months Archery products maker Bowtech is shedding 43 workers and vacating its 87,000-square-foot long-time home on Highway 99 near the Eugene Airport. The property, owned by an investor, has recently been put up for sale at $7.7 million.
• Hat maker Pacific Headwear eliminated 83 local jobs earlier this summer and vacated its 79,000-square-foot building in the Coburg industrial park. The 36-year-old building is owned by a Eugene investment group, property records indicate. Asking price: $9.1 million.
The Bowtech and Pacific Headwear jobs are being moved out of state by parent companies. The True Value work is being shifted by parent company Do It Best to a Woodburn warehouse.
Other big vacant business properties already for sale include the former Royal Caribbean call center in Springfield and the former HMT computer hard-drive disc factory in west Eugene. Both have been vacant for years. Also on the market: high-tech company Datalogic’s half-vacant manufacturing and research complex in west Eugene.
Electric demand
Plenty of job-creating businesses are interested in Lane County, Sayre says, but adds they want buildings that exactly suit their needs.
In the past 18 months, “advanced manufacturers, food producers and technology companies” have all scrutinized sites in the county, but they typically want much more electrical capacity than is offered at most available Lane County properties, Sayre says. Each inquiring company has typically wanted up to about 20 megawatts, he says. That’s enough to power 10,000 to 20,000 homes.
“Very few of our sites can serve that kind of load today, and that delta between what prospects need and what we can deliver is the region’s real recruitment ceiling.”
Re-using an RV factory
A drawback to the True Value property is its sheer size, several real estate brokers say. “That square footage is really, really large,” notes one broker.
The property’s strength is its location near a Highway 126 interchange. It might be carved up and leased to multiple tenants, the broker says.
The Lane County assessor puts a market value of $26 million on the building. The annual property tax bill is $395,000.
Some industrial properties now for sale have already gone through reincarnations.
The Coburg building vacated by Pacific Headwear is part of a five-building complex originally built by RV maker Monaco Coach Corp. in the 1990s. Monaco went bankrupt in 2009. Entrepreneur Steve Lee bought the complex in 2012, split it into individual parcels and sold off most of the pieces to industrial users. He still owns one empty former Monaco building: A 32,000-square-foot former spray-painting facility. That’s for sale at $5.3 million, according to Eugene broker Evans Elder Brown & Seubert.
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.