The site of the warehouse with the existing buildings to be demolished marked by red X's.
The warehouse and its parking lot will fill the footprint of the office buildings.
Three office buildings in Mount Laurel will be demolished and the property owner will build a huge warehouse in their place, the Planning Board decided on Thursday, July 13.
Members unanimously approved Gateway Park LLC's application for the 437,262-square-foot warehouse on Gaither Road, replacing a total of 216,730 square feet of office space.
Members of the public did not testify.
A warehouse is a permitted use for the 26.5-acre site.
The board approved the preliminary and major site plans for the warehouse, which will have 107 loading docks, 104 trailer parking spaces and 224 car parking spaces. The number of parking spaces was one point of discussion because the owner does not yet have tenants for the warehouse, making estimates difficult.
This warehouse ranks among the larger ones in New Jersey and far outsizes recently approved warehouse projects in the area.Â
At 437,262 square feet, the new warehouse will be more than twice the size of warehouses approved in the last year in Mount Laurel for Fellowship Road and Briggs Road and in Cherry Hill on Woodcrest Road.Â
The warehouse also will be nearly seven times the size of a particularly controversial one planned at Walton Avenue and Union Mill Road in Mount Laurel. That one was denied by the Planning Board and the developer went to court. The board settled the case and approved the warehouse.
Even though the warehouse is large, it does not come close in size to fulfilment centers or warehouses used by some large manufacturers across the United States.
For example, Amazon reports its sortable fulfillment centers — where goods are picked, packed and shipped — are about 800,000 square feet in size. Other Amazon fulfillment centers that focus on larger-sized customer items can be 600,000 to 1 million square feet. Amazon's largest warehouse of about 4 million square feet is in Ontario, California.
Some publications have suggested that New Jersey should now be called the "Warehouse State" rather than the "Garden State" as building continues around the state near busy highways.
The boom comes as retailing and how consumers buy goods is changing. At the same time, the demand for office space has fallen off a cliff as more and more employees are working from home or splitting time between home and the office.
Representatives of Gateway Park told the board that the office buildings there are largely vacant and not used.
