Through my “channels” at Twitter, I received the following
news message. My city Almere is planning a new ‘fuel, food/beverage and hospitality
point’ at a desolate industrial zone at the south-east side of Almere.
Here are the pertinent snips of this article:
“Tender for fuel sales
point Facility Point at Stichtsekant”
At the logistically-aimed
industrial zone Stichtsekant in Almere, sufficient potential demand has emerged
for a Facilitity Point. The basic elements of this Facility Point will be a
fuel sales point (gas station) with a shop and one or more food-and-beverage companies.
On top of that, other functions would be welcomed, like a guarded parking zone
for trucks and a hotel. The municipality Almere reserves a lot of 11,000 square
meters and challenges entrepreneurs and real estate developers to start their
enterprise.
Potential customers of
this Facility Point are the many car drivers at the A27 highway and the
logistical companies at the Stichtsekant industrial zone. The industrial zone
is positioned at the A27, where tens of thousands of drivers pass each day.
It is a commercial
zone in development, which mainly attracts logistical companies. During the
coming decades, this commercial zone will grow to a lively centre of more than
100 hectares in size. Alderman for Economic Development Ben Scholten: “logistics
is an industry at which we aim as Almere. It is complementary to the many,
active E-commerce companies in our city. We have the location and space for
logistical companies and we already host a lot of companies which are very good
at logistics. Utilities like this one will reinforce the establishment climate
for this beautiful industry”.
Cities and municipalities have a ‘duty’ to offer jobs and business
opportunities to their inhabitants.
In other words: when a city wants to have new inhabitants
and keep their existing ones, it must build an infrastructure were new
companies can be established and existing companies and institutions want to
move to.
This leads to the following argumentation: New commercial infrastructure à [new/existing]
companies and institutions à new jobs à
new inhabitants!
By itself, this is a logical and valid argumention:
especially in a situation where commercial/industrial zones and commercial
activity are scarce, this would be the way to go for communities.
Unfortunately, however, there is NOT much scarcity with
respect to commercial/industrial zones in The Netherlands. During the last
decades, all the cities and municipalities in The Netherlands had the same idea
to develop commercial/industrial zones and establishments for food/beverage and
hospitality close to these zones.
In the end these zones and terrains didn’t offer a necessary
infrastructure anymore, in order to meet a real and present demand for
commercial / industrial space. Instead, these commercial and industrial zones
started to cannibalize on each other, in order to divide a pie, that became smaller
and smaller.
Large companies profited from this development and chose the
commercial / industrial zones where the local taxes, levies, infrastructure and
subsidies were the most favorable. Due to the fierce competition between cities
and municipalities in The Netherlands, these large companies were often lured
to move to those newly built industrial / commercial zones with all kinds of
special facilities, at the expense of other (older) industrial zones. The
result of these cannibalistic policies was vacancy at many industrial zones: a
lot of (often structural) vacancy.
This effect was reinforced by the economic crisis that broke
out in 2008. Due to the crisis, there is hardly any additional demand for
commercial activities and services at this moment. A tell-tale indicator is the
(structural) vacancy of commercial real estate in The Netherlands of 16%. In
Almere, this number is even 23.4%.
This brings me to the presented plan, concerning the ‘Facility
Point’:
By itself such a venue sounds great, as it could bring new
jobs and new business opportunities to a zone with already much present traffic
and consequently much potential customers. On top of that, its attraction and
the customers it brings could help the present industrial zone to develop
further
However, in my opinion things are a little different.
Stichtsekant is not a quickly developing industrial zone, but a zone that has
led a stable, somewhat comatose existence during the last 5 – 10 years. There
are a few logistical companies, but that is about it. During my bikerides in recent
years and the many times that I past this zone with my car, I hardly noticed
any significant development in it.
On top of that, the zone is positioned at a not very
attractive side of Almere. There is hardly any other commercial activity around
it and it is far removed from the centre of the city, without a public
transport infrastructure being present. Besides that, the cars and truckers
that pass the venue, need to leave the highway and drive for one kilometer, in
order to get there.
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| Industrial zone Stichtsekant Picture courtesy of Google Streetview Click to enlarge |
These circumstances are all serious handicaps for the viability
of this Facility Point and for the entrepreneurs that will run it in the
future. And there is more.
Not far from this industrial zone – within a 20 km range –
there are 3 other gas stations, 3 hotels and a few restaurants – directly at or
close to the highway (see the pictures).
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| Activity close to industrial zone Stichtsekant Picture courtesy of Google Maps Click to enlarge |
Unfortunately, I am afraid that these circumstances will
reduce the viability of this facility point, while I don’t see much chances for
growth of the industrial zone Stichtsekant itself in the near future. The
painful truth is that there are just too many industrial zones in The
Netherlands and too little demand for new industrial / commercial space, due to
the crisis.
I do appreciate the attempts of Almere to change the future
of this particular industrial zone, but I would prefer when the city was
looking harder for new companies and institutions to inhabit this zone in the
first place. Although this facility point could be an ‘enabler’ for such companies
to come to Stichtsekant, I am afraid that it will not earn a decent income for
the fuel, food and hospitality companies that will utilize it, in the meantime.
Therefore this could easily become a repetition of past
errors, in which plans with too much ambition and too little reality turn awry
for the people who invested in it.
I am sorry, but that is the way that I see it.
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