Riverside-based NorthPoint Development has bitten off another chunk of out-of-state industrial development, and an online pet food retailer is helping ensure that it isn’t too much to chew.
Chewy.com, a company based in Dania Beach, Fla., will lease an 800,000-square-foot distribution center that NorthPoint is developing on a 172-acre site in Hanover Township near Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
NorthPoint acquired the site, which was remediated after being scarred by coal mining, for $15 million in September.
Brent Miles, NorthPoint’s vice president of economic development, helped secure a tax abatement for the property, where he said NorthPoint will develop three buildings totaling about 2 million square feet.
Chewy.com is expected to employ 600 in the first building. Fully developed, the site is expected to provide about 2,000 jobs, Miles said.
The Hanover Township project is NorthPoint’s third in Pennsylvania. It also has developed the 755,000-square-foot Eden Road Logistics Center in York, and 25 Keystone, a 1.27 million-square-foot facility in Pottsville.
While most of its 28 million square feet of industrial projects are in the Kansas City area, NorthPoint also has developed industrial projects in the St. Louis area and eight states outside of Kansas and Missouri. Besides Pennsylvania, they include Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.
A significant part of NorthPoint’s industrial expansion has been fueled by a partnership with General Motors that stretches back to shortly after NorthPoint’s founding in 2012.
Chad Meyer, president and COO of NorthPoint, said recently that the new $55 million GM logistics center now rising from NorthPoint’s Central Industrial Park in the Kansas City, Kan.’s Fairfax Industrial District is part of more than 4 million square feet of build-to-suit development NorthPoint is working on for GM at sites nationwide.
Besides the 840,000-square-foot Kansas City, Kan., facility, the GM projects are in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Wentzville, Mo.; Spring Hill, Tenn.; Lordstown, Ohio; Bowling Green, Ky.; and Arlington, Texas.