CHICAGO—Officials from Dayton Street Partners, a Chicago-based commercial real estate investment and development firm, say they are ready to break ground for a 40,000-square-foot warehouse/distribution facility on a vacant 1.61-acre parcel located at 4150 N. Knox Ave. in Chicago.
The new project, a joint venture with Chicago-based WBS Equities, LLC, is part of a growing effort by developers to place such facilities in the city and close to urban consumers that now expect same-day or next-day deliveries. Amazon, for example, announced earlier this year that it was renovating a small Goose Island warehouse into a distribution outlet.
“There is a high demand for distribution space with access to high-density neighborhoods both north and south,” Dayton Street principal Howard Wedren tells GlobeSt.com. And the Knox project, located just half a block from the entrance to the Kennedy Expressway, "is unique because the barrier to entry on the North Side is very high. Land zoned for industrial use is hard to come by.”
Other neighborhoods on the periphery of the downtown will also benefit from this trend. As reported in GlobeSt.com, Dayton Street will soon break ground on a new speculative distribution building at 41st and Halsted Sts. on the South Side in Stockyards Industrial Park. And in 2014, Wanxiang America Real Estate Group and Clarius Partners, LLC acquired the former APL Logistics facility at 2302 S. Paulina in Pilsen so they could demolish it and build a 162,000-square-foot warehouse building targeted at food distributors.
Dayton Street will begin construction on its Knox Ave. facility in the fall. It will feature 30' clear height, pre-cast concrete, four docks, two drive in docks and T8 lighting. The building will also include about 4,000 square feet of office space and parking for 50 vehicles.
"This will be the only building with 30' clear height on the North Side," Wedren adds. Many of the area's industrial buildings are antiquated with ceilings under 20' and lack proper docking facilities, forcing truckers to unload deliveries on traffic-choked streets. "That's an inefficient way to run a distribution center."
The company expects to complete the project by next summer and has retained Mike Senner and Steve Kohn of Colliers International to oversee the leasing and marketing.
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
