Chicago-based Bridge Industrial has received conditional approval from the City of Tacoma for its latest project, Bridge Point 2MM. This development is set to be a four-building, 2.5 million-square-foot industrial campus on former BNSF Railway Co. property in South Tacoma’s Nalley Valley, according to a recent report by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The company’s plans include building sizes ranging from 320,000 to nearly 1 million square feet, according to marketing documents by commercial brokerage firm Kidder Mathews, which is leading the leasing activities on behalf of the developer.
The development, located at 5024 S. Madison Street, while welcome for the city of Tacoma, has not been without some pushback from its neighbors. The South Tacoma Neighborhood Council sees the project as a major disruptor of the region’s traffic patterns and the environment as a whole. The land, which has been used as an industrial property since the late 1800s, was also a former federal Superfund cleanup site.
The project ultimately received a “mitigated determination of non-significance” and a critical areas development permit from the city. This permit includes conditions such as wetlands and stream restoration, tree protections, new plantings, and environmental mitigations under the State Environmental Policy Act.
Opponents of the project and those who would like like to appeal the permit and SEPA determination have until May 5th to do so.
Bridge Industrial purchased the 150-acre site for $158 million in September 2021, and the company submitted pre-development documents to the city soon thereafter. Despite being planned long before the market began to display weaknesses due to increasing interest rates and inflation, the speculative project will still contribute a substantial amount of industrial space to the South Sound market. A CBRE report showed negative absorption in the Tacoma industrial market in the first quarter of 2023, though this could be attributed to new warehouse space completed earlier this year and coming online at a time when other macroeconomic trends could be impacting the overall market. The majority of the industrial product completed in the Puget Sound region, which amounts to 1.3 million square feet, is situated in the South Sound markets of Tacoma and Olympia, as well as Lewis County.
