The Changing Face of Office and Industrial Parks.

• Author: Manuel, John

The definition of industrial and office parks in North Carolina is rapidly changing. Parks are now well-equipped and aesthetically pleasing.

In many respects, the Whitehall development off Interstate 485 southwest of Charlotte represents the cutting edge of industrial/business/office parks in North Carolina. Within its 700 acres, Whitehall includes a corporate center, office park, technology center, retail center, apartments and single-family homes -- a truly mixed-use development. The park has two interchanges onto 1-485, and is accessible to more than one million people within a 20-mile radius. Fiber-optic connections are available via a SONET network, and electrical power is provided by two different substations to ensure redundancy. Sidewalks connect all the buildings in the development to promote walking instead of driving. Other amenities include extensive green space and lakes for aesthetic beauty and retention of storm water. There's even a 45-acre nature preserve.

"It's got everything we could think of that would work together well," says Jim Merrifield, president of Crosland Commercial, which developed the master plan for Whitehall.

As we enter the 21st century, developers are incorporating a vast array of features into their industrial/business/office parks. These features reflect the demands and expectations of a host of stakeholders including corporate clients, state and local planners and regulators, neighborhood groups and the workers themselves. Incorporating these features has substantially raised the cost, time and effort involved in developing these parks, but the result can be impressive.

The defining aspects of contemporary industrial/ business/ office parks include a virtual alphabet soup, beginning with appearance. Industrial parks used to consist of windowless metal buildings on minimally landscaped grounds surrounded by a chain-link fence, which is increasingly a thing of the past, at least in urban and suburban areas of the state. Not only do many jurisdictions enforce aesthetic requirements in terms of landscaping, setbacks, signage and building material (e.g. no metal shells), corporate clients demand them as well.

"We are now competing in a global market, and many clients, particularly those from Europe and Asia, place a premium on appearance," says Steve Nye, Cleveland County economic development director. "We recruited a Japanese company to the Cleveland County Industrial Park who spent four or five hours with my landscape architect discussing how to build a fully functioning Japanese garden on the premises. If this is going to be your company's North American headquarters, you've got an image to maintain."

"If you make your park attractive from the get-go, you will attract better companies, and the companies will attract better workers' says Douglas Byrd, director of industrial recruitment for the North Carolina Department of Commerce. "Companies look at industrial parks in much the same way a home buyer looks at a subdivision. The better it looks, the more inclined they are to locate there."

Appearance standards extend to such details as entrances fashioned of ornamental block and stone, divided roadways with grassy medians, extensive landscaping and the construction of reflecting pools and fountains. Warehouses are frequently faced with brick instead of metal. Loading bays are located at the back of buildings. Larger developments may establish a property owners association to ensure that common areas are maintained over the long term.

Closely tied to the issue of appearance is amenities...