The port is planning for less cargo, and the IE already has the empty buildings

Citrus Belt Review: On June 11 the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners approved a $3.4 billion budget for fiscal 2026/27 built on a projection of 9.3 million container units, which the port itself put at 7% below its current-year forecast, citing trade-policy volatility and a more cautious outlook. The headline number is a capital story — spending up 25%, the biggest improvement program in over a decade — but the demand assumption underneath it is the part that lands here. The IE is where those containers turn into leases, and the leasing has already cooled. CBRE pegged IE Core industrial vacancy at 7.8% in the first quarter of 2026, with negative net absorption of 4.7 million square feet and four separate buildings over a million square feet each going dark in a single quarter. Colliers, tracking a wider footprint, counted 53.6 million square feet sitting vacant region-wide — against 1.9 million in the same quarter of 2022 — and asking rents down roughly 39% from their mid-2023 peak. Builders read the signal a year ago: CBRE recorded about 102,000 square feet of new deliveries in the quarter, against nearly 2 million a year earlier.

The national read on a port budget is procedural — capital plans, bridge projects, a sustainability line. The local read is simpler and harder. When the busiest container gateway in the country builds its own budget around softer volume, the IE doesn't get a forecast; it gets a vacancy rate. The port is naming next year. The corridor is already living it.