The Price of America’s New Factory Boom

scale of this project is just extraordinary Factory construction has doubled across the United States in the past year with hundreds of billions of government dollars pouring in to boost domestic manufacturing the work on Hyundai's first ever electric vehicle plant is now underway it's a $5.5 billion investment called The Meta plant America and people are watching their towns and neighbors change quickly wow some people are really eager about the land rush that's going on a lot of people frankly don't know what to expect we have a high demand and a low Supply and it's definitely dangerous for our communities to keep on this Gold Rush Warehouse speculation when we don't know if we need it in 2022 the Korean car maker Hyundai broke ground on a new electric vehicle plant in Brian County Georgia just west of the historic city of Savannah the plant will cost $7.6 billion to build and employ 8,500 people and create thousands of more jobs around it it's an example of a trend across the United States where f construction has nearly doubled in the past year fueled by legislation pushed through by the Biden Administration that provides hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for clean energy and semiconductors this site is almost 3,000 Acres that's about half the size of a small City pretty extraordinary timeline here they want to be up and running actually crank out automobiles in October 2024 why are they on such a a tight timeline what you're seeing in the competitive race in the electric vehicle world you're seeing every company wanting to gain as much market share as possible and whoever gets the cars on the road the fastest winds why the south I mean it is there's an extraordinary number of plants it's still affordable in the South you know cost of living cost of do business we've got great Transportation networks we got the world's busiest airport in Atlanta we got the fastest growing port in Savannah it's the sixth fastest growing county in the United States there's just a lot of attention in what's going on here and U it's a good time to be here here in downtown Pembrook Georgia which has around 2500 people a lot of people are apprehensive about the coming Hyundai plant that's around 10 miles away but a lot of people are are eager as well the small businesses up and down Main Street of Pembroke are seeing a little bit of additional business will you see any additional business and are you already seeing any additional business over the past several years it's grown faster and faster especially with the development of the Hyundai plant coming here several of the I believe to be upper management eat here now I've got to work on my Korean um for sure but yeah I see a lot of it already a local Economist at estimates the factory will spawn 20,000 jobs 8,000 to work at the plant 5,000 to supply it and more for the restaurants and businesses that will pop up to serve them while local business spending might Trend upwards locals worry about where the thousands of new Factory workers will live and the town is stirred by gosip about Gold Rush land sales so Sarah tell me how how much has changed since the last year and a half or so since Hyundai announced this plan you've got a lot of interest from a lot of land owners that are closer to the plant for the commercial aspect of it they're definitely looking to sell and you know make money on land that they never thought they could get near to what prices are going for now tell me about the just the housing stock here now it seems like there's just not enough for what's coming down the pike right yeah we have a high demand and a low Supply we have a lot of people that's working to provide that with communities and going through the the Hoops to do that it seems like there's a a lot of money waiting to be deployed in this area you're already talking with investors want to build neighborhoods right but there's a little bit of a hurdle with seems like the infrastructure specifically the water and sewer is not place yet they're working on getting it to that point there's really nothing that the construction owners or the developers can really do without the assistance of the municipalities surrounding Brian County temporarily slowed development until they better understand it placing a moratorium on applications to rezone until the end of the year the chief concern is water and wastewater capacity Brian County and the three neighboring counties are building a massive wastewater treatment plant to prepare for the plan with this rapid ability to transform areas the environmental concerns are also there and savana's beautiful landscape is definitely seeing an increase in warehousing about a year ago we could have stood here and it was a nice country road we would have heard the birds chirping in the back ground but as you can see in our background we have both the warehouses and an incredible amount of truck traffic the growth that it's going to Spur is also uh it's going to be far reaching and wide and it's going to be population growth so we're going to see a lot more subdivisions a lot more housing a lot more Wastewater uh some storm water issues there we're really concerned potentially about uh the the waste from manufacturing batteries uh there's a lot of heavy metals and other chemicals that you know pretty nasty we want to keep add the environment America's factories are building fast and some cities are trying to catch up here in Savannah despite efforts to address a shortage of water sewer and housing Hyundai's extraordinary building Pace leaves many issues unresolved at least in the short term but it's clear Savannah's economy will see a much bigger mix of manufacturing jobs added to its traditional Reliance on tourism and at [Music] Seaport other Southern towns have seen rapid expansions with the entry of automakers like Chattanooga Tennessee after it got a Volkswagen Plant Chattanooga was inundated with hotels and apartment complexes and the same happened in West Point Georgia whose downtown's boom is linked to the Kia plant nearby so for the surprisingly bare area around Hyundai things will will soon change quickly as investors line up to build around the factory as soon as they get the green [Music] [Applause] light [Music] oh

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 531,859

Keywords: News, bloomberg, quicktake, business, bloomberg quicktake, quicktake originals, bloomberg quicktake by bloomberg, documentary, mini documentary, mini doc, doc, us news, world news, finance, science

Id: sTmcgLCbLL0

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023