Pallet racking in Fogelsville, PA.

Fogelsville sits in Upper Macungie Township at the I-78 Exit 49 interchange, and along with neighboring Breinigsville and Trexlertown it forms the densest concentration of large-format distribution space in the Lehigh Valley. This is the corridor that took the region from under 4 million square feet of big-box warehouse in 2000 to more than 40 million square feet today. The buildings here are the newest in the Valley and they are built to a consistent modern spec: 36-to-40-foot clear, post-tension slabs, ESFR sprinkler systems, deep truck courts, and floor plates measured in the hundreds of thousands of square feet. Redevelopment of the former Air Products property alone brought millions of additional square feet of approved warehouse into this corridor. The racking implication is straightforward — in Fogelsville you are almost always buying cube rather than floor, and the constraint is rarely the building. Upper Macungie Township enforces the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code, with plan review handled in-house and through retained third-party code agencies.

Across the I-78 Exit 49 corridor that took this region past 40 million square feet of warehouse, permits route through the Upper Macungie Township building code office with plan reviews typically running three to five weeks. Nearly every Class A building in this corridor is post-tension; landlords here generally require documented PT scanning before any drilling.