Industry has a crucial role in the economy of the San Francisco Bay Area:

• It provides the service sector with indispensable support.
• It boosts the overall economy through its ample multiplier effects.
• It furnishes quality employment to a diverse workforce.
• In a world of rising transportation costs and mounting environmental concerns, the value of local production, distribution and repair business—which includes re-use and recycling—will become ever more apparent.

But at the moment, industry in the Bay Area is under heavy pressure from a speculative real estate market. Many industrial lands have already been converted to housing and other so-called “higher value” uses. Rezoning’s ripple effect drives up the price of real estate, invites conflict with nearby residential and retail uses and produces uncertainty about long-term capital investment in industrial operations.  

Industrial lands are often specially situated for access to water, rail, regional highways and arterial streets. In the Bay Area’s built-out cities, such locations are at a premium.   Like California farmland, industrial land, once lost, is gone forever. Indeed, many people think that industry is gone or unavoidably on the way out.  

In another common misconception, industry is equated with factories belching toxic smoke and workers performing routinized, mind-numbing tasks. That image obscures the high-tech reality of our region’s modern manufacturers and the well-paid, skilled employment they offer.  

Re-defining industry in 21st-century terms, the Bay Area Industrial Roundtable will

• Demonstrate local industry’s essential contributions to a regional economy that’s innovative, resilient and equitable
• Identify the challenges faced by industrial businesses and the linked economies of Bay Area cities; and
• Offer policies that support industry’s role in balanced “smart” growth.