Back in September, Long Beach hosted its inaugural Grow Long Beach presentation discussing the program aimed at growing businesses in the city.
Fast-forward a year and a lot’s happened, including most recently Ford Motor Co. signing a 250,000-square-foot lease in the city to build a research and development center focusing on electric vehicles.
The announcement that the carmaker was taking on such a large footprint in the city came at the end of June.
The new center, which is slated to open in early 2025, is expected to bring 450 jobs to the city. The company previously had a plant in Long Beach that opened in 1936 but closed 65 years ago.
“Long Beach is a key part of our broader strategy to attract top talent to develop future vehicles and experiences for our customers,” Doug Field, Ford’s chief electric vehicle, digital and design officer, said in a statement. “The Ford Advanced Electric Vehicle Development facility, which will be led by Alan Clarke, is an essential hub of innovation in electric vehicle products and technology. Ford will continue to recruit the best design and hardware/software talent in the world, and this new development center will provide an ideal hub to enable that talent.”
Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said the city wants to “be easy to do business with” and entice more large companies to come to the area. Ford, he said, reached out to his office about a year ago and the city “started courting them.”
“This is a real commitment with an eye toward the future and growth,” Richardson said.
Moving away from oil
Richardson said that “as California moves away from the production of fossil fuels, we have to get ahead of it” – hence the push to bring new businesses to a city that has hosted oil production for more than 100 years. The mayor called the Ford lease “validation that our strategy is working and that Long Beach is a place that companies like Ford want to be.”
Jason Fine, a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., said he has seen a lot of interest in Long Beach.
“The news with Ford and Vast and a lot of these companies I would attribute to the really diverse and highly skilled labor pool,” he said. “Long Beach has a really strong foundation and the pro-business government is really a plus.”
Still, he said vacancy rates are higher than they were pre-pandemic, which is consistent with what is being seen elsewhere. However, Fine said that in the last few months he has seen positive net absorption in class A buildings.
He added that big leases like Ford will have an impact on the rest of the market.
“It’s going to be a huge help. It’s Ford’s EV division so we will see that create another ecosystem in the market. We already have aerospace and hard tech manufacturing and this just adds to that,” he said.
There is a lot of residential development in the area, which Fine said will further add to companies’ desire to be in Long Beach.
In the next two years, Richardson said, the city will add more than 1,000 new high-paying jobs in engineering, tech and advanced manufacturing.
Other companies have recently come to the area as well, Richardson said.
Ampaire, for example, moved its headquarters to the Long Beach Airport. The company works on hybrid electric aircraft systems development. And aerospace giant SpaceX renewed its lease in the city and is doubling its facility’s footprint. It will grow to 15 acres, including land, office and manufacturing space.
Vast, another aerospace company, now has 450 employees and is expected to beat its five year goal of 800 employees two years ahead of time.
“We really have an exciting engineering and aerospace hub in Long Beach,” Richardson said.
Looking forward, Richardson said the city was making investments in tourism and destination venues, in addition to courting more companies to come to the area.
“We have some real momentum,” he said.
