Warehouse footprint hits 1 billion square feet as the jobs it once promised keep falling

The billion-square-foot figure comes from a report by a coalition of environmental groups opposed to further warehouse development, and the number is theirs. But the employment trend underneath it is the state's own, and it runs in a direction the footprint can't explain away.

The Employment Development Department's most recent release shows transportation and warehousing down 2,200 jobs over the month — the steepest loss of any sector in the region. That is part of a longer contraction the regional development group IEGO puts at roughly 26,000 logistics jobs lost in the first half of 2025, against about 47,000 the sector added over the prior five years.

Run those two facts together and the decoupling is what matters. For most of the past decade, a new building meant new hiring. Square footage and payroll moved together, and the region took the trade: traffic, air quality, and land in exchange for jobs. That link is weakening. The space keeps getting built and occupied while the headcount it used to carry flattens or falls.

Part of that is cyclical — the unwind of the pandemic warehousing surge, which no economist disputes. Part of it may be structural. Automation in distribution operations is positioned to hold down labor demand even as freight volume recovers; the coalition's report puts the share of warehouse jobs exposed at 75%, while IEGO has estimated up to 60% over time. Both are projections of risk, not counts of jobs already gone, and they should be read that way.

The same release shows where the regional labor market is actually growing: health care and social assistance added 20,200 jobs over the year, the bulk of the region's net gain. The sector with the most square footage is shedding workers; the sector carrying the region barely builds anything.

For an operator, the takeaway is narrow and concrete. A warehouse going up nearby no longer signals a wave of local hiring the way it did five years ago, and a logistics tenant signing a lease is not the employment event it once was. The buildings and the jobs have come apart, and underwriting either one on the assumption that the other follows is now a mistake.