9.4M sq ft approved in Palmdale

Palmdale just approved enough industrial space to stack roughly nine Burbank-sized Amazons in one place: 9.4 million square feet at the Antelope Valley Commerce Center, a two-part project called East and West that covers about 510 acres. (prnewswire.com) The new vote was for the East side, which cleared just over 8 million square feet. Add the already planned West side at about 1.4 million square feet, and the full project reaches the 9.4 million-square-foot headline number. (connectcre.com) (prnewswire.com) This is not a permit to pour concrete tomorrow on every building. An entitlement is the government saying the land can legally be used this way, after approvals like zoning, a specific plan, a development agreement, and environmental review are in place. (citizenportal.ai) (ceqanet.lci.ca.gov) Palmdale’s City Council had already moved the project through that machinery in January 2025, when it unanimously adopted the Antelope Valley Commerce Center specific plan and certified the environmental impact report. This week’s news is the developer saying the remaining entitlement step for the East side is now in hand. (citizenportal.ai) (theregistrysocal.com) The site is in the Antelope Valley, on the northern edge of Los Angeles County, where land is cheaper and parcels are bigger than the infill sites closer to the ports. The project materials pitch direct access to Highway 14 and connections onward to Interstate 5 and Interstate 15. (cityofpalmdaleca.gov) (cbre.com) That location tells you what kind of bet this is. Developers go farther from the Los Angeles Basin when they think tenants will trade a longer drive for lower rent, bigger truck courts, and buildings that are hard to fit into older industrial neighborhoods. (mikeradlovic.com) (cbre.com) The scale is large even by Southern California standards. The developer says the campus could include a single building as large as 2 million square feet, while marketing materials show planned building sizes ranging from about 57,200 square feet to 1.6 million square feet. (prnewswire.com) (cityofpalmdaleca.gov) Covington Group is also talking about more than warehouses. The company says the zoning and site plan can serve logistics users and advanced manufacturing, and the brochure lists Aerospace Industrial zoning, which fits Palmdale’s long aerospace history around Plant 42 and nearby defense work. (prnewswire.com) (cbre.com) Palmdale has been trying to line up that story for a while. In June 2023, the city announced a Trader Joe’s food assembly and distribution facility of about 1 million square feet that it said would create nearly 1,000 full-time jobs, giving the area a real tenant example instead of just a land map. (cityofpalmdaleca.gov) There is still a long distance between entitled land and occupied buildings. A city summary for an amended purchase-and-sale agreement says marketing time now runs to June 2027, phased land purchases are tied to sequencing, and about $22 million of regional improvements are front-loaded before the full buildout. (citizenportal.ai) (cityofpalmdaleca.gov) So the headline is not that 9.4 million square feet suddenly hit the market this week. The headline is that Los Angeles County now has one more giant industrial option on the shelf, with legal approvals in place, a projected buildout above $1.2 billion, and enough room to shape leasing in the Antelope Valley for years if tenants actually show up. (prnewswire.com)