One of the saddest things about my daily commute to New York City from New Jersey (besides the 90-minute plus travel time) are some of the sights I see everyday from the bus window. As I cross over the Pulaski Skyway, I notice the scores of abandoned factories, shuttered stores and former manufacturing sites that litter the landscape from Newark to Hoboken.

The most common way for policy-makers and planners to handle this problem is to rezone manufacturing areas to allow commercial mixed-use. You can see it in the conversion of the Stella D’Oro factory in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, the condo makeover of the Dixon-Ticonderoga plant in Jersey City and the rezoning of massive swaths in Manhattan’s Fur District and in Long Island City.

Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with taking underutilized sites and making them active again, but I remember what NYU Schack’s Institute of Real Estate’s divisional dean Jim Stuckey told me in an interview recently: converting manufacturing zones to residential “is taking away any chance of capturing new types of technology and industrial development.”