The Last Mile of Reindustrialization Is Real Estate
State and local governments play a critical - and overlooked - role in what gets built
KEN BIBERAJ is the host of Coffee with Ken and advises advanced manufacturing and defense companies on site selection and industrial strategy.
A few weeks ago, I sat across from Madeline Hart—co-author of Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III—at the inaugural Coffee with Ken Summit just outside D.C. There were 300 people in the room: senior officials from DoW, DOT, and DOE; aerospace and defense industry leaders; builders, investors, and operators who are all trying to figure out the same thing. How do we actually do this? How do we take the national will to reindustrialize and turn it into factories on the ground?
It’s clear that the will to mobilize is there. The capital is there. The companies are ready to build. But they keep running into the same wall.
From my perspective as a real estate site selector, that wall isn’t in Washington. It’s in the fifty states that control every piece of land, every power line, every permit, and every zoning decision that determines whether a factory gets built. Mobilize is a book about the national will to build. This is an essay about who is responsible for the execution once that will exists.
For Once, Don’t Blame the Swamp
Washington cannot rezone a county. It cannot accelerate a permitting process administered by a state environmental agency. It cannot extend a water line, upgrade a substation, or entitle 3,000 acres for an advanced manufacturing campus. It cannot override local opposition to an industrial facility or build the workforce pipeline that makes a facility viable for the next thirty years.
All of that—every single element that determines whether a site is shovel-ready and ribbon-worthy—is controlled at the state and local level. I advise advanced manufacturing and defense companies on where to locate, and I watch this dynamic play out in real time across the country.
The gap between federal ambition and state execution is a billable problem that I make a living working to navigate. When a site timeline slips by two years because a state agency couldn’t coordinate a utility extension with a permitting office, it is a capacity failure three levels down, in a building most people in DC have never heard of.
The states that understand this are pulling away. The states that don’t are losing deals they don’t even know they’re losing.
The Incentive Playbook is Outdated
For forty years, economic development has run on a simple formula: recruit a company, offer a tax abatement, cut a ribbon, issue a press release. Cash grants. Job creation credits. Maybe some workforce training dollars thrown in. It was as simple as plugging some variables into an Excel model.
That model worked well enough for a world of conventional manufacturing and distribution facilities. It does not work for the AI-powered factories of the future.
A gigafactory doesn’t need a tax credit. It needs a fully entitled site with rail access, 300-plus megawatts of dedicated power, a water supply commitment, and a permitting timeline that won’t slip three years into the project because of a challenged environmental review. An advanced semiconductor fab needs a workforce pipeline that doesn’t exist yet, a supply chain ecosystem in the same region, and a state government sophisticated enough to coordinate across a dozen agencies without dropping the ball.
Most state economic development agencies are not built to deliver any of that. They are built to process incentive applications for Fortune 200 companies and host trade missions. Those are not the same thing, and companies building the next generation of American manufacturing know the difference immediately. This new group of innovators is venture backed, moves fast, and did not exist three to five years ago. States have a hard time understanding these companies, much less underwriting them.
The Data Center Tradeoff
There is a specific distortion worth naming: the data center.
Over the last decade, states quietly became addicted to data center investment. The deals were easy and involved minimal permitting complexity relative to capital intensity. In turn, these capital-intensive projects looked great in press releases. The problem is they consumed enormous amounts of power and land, and generated almost no employment density per acre or per megawatt.
Now, as manufacturing companies come looking for megawatts and sites, they are finding grid capacity already committed, the best industrial land absorbed, and incentive budgets exhausted on facilities that will never produce a meaningful number of jobs. It is hard to blame states entirely—they didn’t have a national industrial policy framework to tell them what they were trading away. But the tradeoff is real, and it is biting.
I raised this at a conference not long ago. I mentioned that the president’s national security strategy explicitly calls for reindustrialization, and I asked the room full of state and local economic development officers what they were doing to meet that national security need. The blank stares didn’t go unnoticed. Dozens came up afterward asking what they were supposed to be doing.
To be fair, the data center debate is not black and white. AI-powered factories will require data centers, even while they compete with traditional industrial investment for skilled labor, land, and resources.
These complex decisions will be made in the zoning boards and utility commissions and permitting offices of fifty states that were never told they are the execution layer of a national mobilization. We are trying to run a World War II-scale industrial build-up through a system that doesn’t know it’s at war.
What Good Looks Like
I travel this country constantly—not to attend conferences, but to sit down, have real conversations, and learn what’s actually happening on the ground floor of reindustrialization. What I find is genuinely encouraging. There are communities doing this right, but they aren’t getting nearly enough attention.
Cleveland is one of them. The city-backed Site Readiness Fund has done something most cities talk about but never do: acquire hundreds of acres of real estate. Cleveland is now doing the hard, patient work of taking those sites to market—determining what industries they are positioned to support, reducing upfront costs for companies, and building the infrastructure that makes a site real rather than just a promise on a map. That is exactly the kind of institutional investment that changes a community’s competitive position by putting it on a path to have factories up and running inside of three years.
Huntsville might be my favorite example. Yes, they have more PhDs per capita than almost anywhere in America. Yes, they landed Space Force. Yes, the innovation ecosystem there is genuinely world-class. But what actually makes Huntsville work is simpler than any of that: an accessible, hands-on mayor; housing being built at a pace that matches demand; and a community culture that feels alive. I went back with two of my sons for Space Camp a few years ago. When a city is good enough that you bring your kids back on vacation, they’re doing something right.
Then there’s Tulsa, which honestly shocked me. I didn’t know what to expect. What I found was a community that has figured out how to get the public sector, private sector, and philanthropic sector to work together. A lot of that connective tissue runs through the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which has woven together the kind of cross-sector partnerships that speed up market access and reduce uncertainty for companies.
And Pittsburgh. I dragged my family there for summer vacation last year. We put the kids in robotics camp at Carnegie Mellon and visited more museums than we did on a trip to Paris. But the story that really gets me is the city’s Hazelwood Green project. Tishman Speyer is transforming the former Jones and Laughlin Steel site—one of the most heavily guarded industrial facilities in America during World War II—into a mixed-use innovation district anchored by Carnegie Mellon’s robotics program and the Pittsburgh Steelers. The most important steel site in the American war effort is becoming the address for American robotics. That’s a blueprint for what reindustrialization can look like when a community puts manufacturing at the forefront.
What States Need to Do
The path forward is not complicated in theory:
Invest in sites before companies show up. The single greatest competitive advantage a state can offer is a development-ready industrial site: entitled, powered, watered, and connected. This requires capital investment without a guaranteed return and a multi-year time horizon that is politically uncomfortable. Cleveland is doing it. A handful of others are doing it. They are winning deals that the rest of the field doesn’t even know they’re losing.
Reduce the upfront cost and risk of locating a facility. Companies deciding where to build right now are choosing based on execution certainty more than incentive packages. A state that can credibly commit to a twelve-month permitting timeline, a shovel-ready site, and a coordinated infrastructure delivery is worth more than a state with a bigger tax credit and an uncertain timeline.
Stop competing on incentive volume and start competing on ecosystem fit. The most durable manufacturing investments are embedded. A company that builds where it fits the regional talent pool, the supply chain geography, and the workforce culture will be there in thirty years. A company that came for the abatement will leave when a competitor state offers a better deal. Tulsa gets this. Huntsville gets this. Most states are still chasing every RFP that crosses their desk regardless of fit.
Build real institutional capacity to execute. This means dedicated project management infrastructure inside government—a team that manages complex projects across agencies and drives them to completion instead of merely processing applications. Pre-negotiated utility agreements. Pre-cleared environmental frameworks for defined industrial zones. A single point of accountability. The difference between a state that can execute and one that can’t is almost never about intent. It’s about the organizational infrastructure to follow through.
And stop giving all the land and power to data centers without an industrial strategy that explains why.
The National Stakes
The premise behind every dollar of federal money committed to industrial policy is that the United States must rebuild its capacity to produce what national security and economic resilience require, from semiconductors to batteries.
This battle will be won or lost in unexpected places like county commission meetings, state utility commission hearings, and permitting offices currently staffed for a quieter era. The adversaries we are competing with do not face those constraints. They build what they decide to build, where they decide to build it, on the timeline they set. Meanwhile, we route major industrial investments through a multi-year permitting gauntlet with unpredictable outcomes and call it a free market.
The federal government has begun working to open federal land for data centers to meet AI demand, which is a start, but a similar strategy should be put in place for broader advanced manufacturing. As a site selector, I push my contacts in DC constantly for better access to federal sites, and the bureaucratic friction is real. If reindustrialization is really a national security concern, our site selection should not be limited to what states offer and private owners are willing to sell. More of the federal estate should be accessible for this mobilization effort.
We need to be able to build fast, pivot fast, and upgrade fast. Right now, our states—the organizations that control the land where those factories go—are not structured for that tempo. We need a real industrial policy. Not a collection of federal funding programs, but a genuine alignment of national goals with the state-level execution mechanisms that determine whether those goals are achievable. That means treating state economic development capacity as a national security asset and investing in it accordingly. It means governors willing to restructure agencies, allocate capital to site preparation, and make long-term bets that don’t pay off until the next administration.
One More Thing
I’m optimistic about America because of the time I spend on the road in places like Cleveland, watching a city invest in its own industrial future. And Huntsville, where a mayor who picks up the phone has helped build one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems in the country. And Tulsa, where I watched public officials, foundation leaders, and private investors finish each other’s sentences because they had been in the same room long enough to understand each other. And Pittsburgh, watching my kids learn to code robots in a building two miles from where American steel won a world war.
These places are proof that rebuilding is possible. The question is whether the rest of the country—and the state and local institutions that hold the keys to reindustrialization—will move fast enough to join them.
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