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In a city with few economic development wins, the redevelopment of the former Cortana Mall site into a massive Amazon fulfillment center represents a significant victory for Baton Rouge.

For starters, there’s the size and scale of the project—a 3.5 million-square-foot facility that will cost some $300 million to develop, process some 500,000 packages a day for the e-retail giant, and employ more than 3,000 mostly full-time workers, not including thousands of drivers, who will work for the company on a contract basis, and part-time seasonal workers.

There are the infrastructure improvements that will come to the area as a result of the redevelopment—upgrades to roads and drainage, signal lights and CATS bus routes. Eventually, even the airport could benefit from the project, if Amazon’s expansion in the area continues and it begins flying Amazon Air to and from Baton Rouge.

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To literally pave the way for the facility, the city-parish will have to make upgrades to some of the streets around the site. Perhaps surprisingly, though, city-parish officials are confident needed traffic mitigation measures will be relatively minimal because Cortana Mall was designed in the mid-1970s to handle at least as much volume as Amazon’s big rigs and delivery vans will generate.

“On the front end, what we have is adequate,” says Fred Raiford, director of transportation and drainage for the city-parish. “But we’re still waiting on a traffic analysis from their people. We’re not sure who will pay for whatever they want.”

Raiford doesn’t expect the changes to be extensive, particularly because the MovEBR program also calls for various upgrades to parts of Airline and Florida. Some of those changes are already underway; others are slated to begin later this year.

“Do we actually need to do any more from infrastructure at this point? I don’t know,” he says. “We will have to look at the numbers. We may need to make some changes to facilitate turning movement so trucks don’t break up half the curb. But we don’t know that until we actually get the report.”

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Among the biggest beneficiaries of the Amazon deal will be the property owners and retailers immediately adjacent to the site. In the months since the project has come together, interest in surrounding real estate has spiked, according to commercial brokers.

Elifin Realty represents the out-of-state investor who owns nine parcels totaling more than 21 acres on the outer ring road surrounding the site and who has already received several offers on some of the parcels.

The properties are listing for an average of nearly $247,000 per acre, with some listing for as much as $392,000 per acre, or $9 per square foot, which is high for undeveloped land. But in real estate, location is everything and the Cortana ring road is suddenly a hot location.

“That’s a very healthy price for undeveloped land in that area,” says appraiser Wesley Moore of Cook, Moore, Davenport & Associates, who recently completed an appraisal on another vacant tract near the site, though he is not at liberty to discuss it. “It was the first of what I expect to be many. You’re going to see speculation prompted and triggered by this Amazon deal.”

So far, interest is coming from multiple sectors. Elifin broker Will Chadwick has fielded interested calls from service providers, restaurants, car washes and retailers—basically, businesses that will cater to Amazon’s round-the-clock employees.

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Moore predicts the interest will spill over to the nearby Choctaw industrial corridor.

“This will be a shot in the arm for the immediate area,” he says. “In the short term, there will be speculation. In the long term, you will see redevelopment, at least to some degree. You will also see absorption of existing supply of older warehouse and industrial space.”

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A 2018 report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that while Amazon fulfillment centers create 30% more warehousing jobs in markets they enter, those job gains are often offset by job losses in other industries. What’s more, overall private sector employment does not materially increase in counties with Amazon fulfillment centers.

More recently, a book published last month by Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, blasts the company for “egregious labor practices,” ruthless politics and exploitation of needy communities and their people.

“An Amazon fulfillment center is better than a shuttered mall,” says Zach Schiller with Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning policy institute that has studied the effect of Amazon on that state’s economy. “But it is by no means what we truly need. … While $15 an hour may seem good to people working at McDonald’s, for this to become the wage that we’re striving for is really problematic. It sets the bar so low.”

It's a very lengthy article, so I won't post the whole thing here. The whole thing is at the link provided.

They detail out some of the types of businesses that are trying to surround Amazon, including other distribution facilities. It seems to have a multiplier effect on those types of jobs.

They also not that the facility at Cortana will employ about 3,000 people...not counting delivery drivers or any ancillary or supporting businesses that open up nearby. It's a transformational project for a city with relatively a high unemployment rate. The jobs will start out at $15 an hour plus benefits. It goes up from there, which is very competitive for Baton Rouge.

Cortana Mall before closure. It's being demolished right now.

This post was edited on 4/7/21 at 2:59 pm