Chicagoland will be adding a lot more warehouse space in the near term:

Molto plans to break ground this month on a 1.1-million-square-foot distribution facility, the first phase of its 110-acre Minooka Ridge Business Park in Minooka, a village near I-80 and southwest of Joliet. The company is also developing Weber55 Logistics Park, a two-building complex on 60 acres at the northeast corner of Weber and Taylor roads in Romeoville, another Joliet suburb. That site will include distribution facilities of 627,840 square feet and 270,000 square feet…

Other developers are just as active. At the end of March, 44 buildings of more than 200,000 square feet, a record-breaking 23.7 million square feet in total, were underway across the Chicago metropolitan area, according to Colliers International.

And tenants are plentiful. In the second quarter alone, Amazon leased a 1-million-square-foot warehouse in Joliet, and another in Kenosha, while other companies, including NFI, SC Johnson and RJW Logistics, signed deals for more than 500,000 square feet.

The amount of big-box industrial space that is vacant in the Chicago area tanked during the first quarter of 2022 because so much space was leased or occupied. The industrial vacancy rate fell ”by more than a full percentage point to 2.61%, a record low by a wide margin,” Colliers reported.

As shopping malls and downtown brick and mortar sales struggle, warehouse space is booming. This helps service online shopping as well as big box stores.

Elsewhere in the article, the increase in warehouse space is tied to jobs and possibly cheaper prices for consumers. But, adding such space may not always work out so well in comparison to how else land could be used. And the locations cited in the article suggest Will County is a warehouse center as are other locations more on the edges of the Chicago region.