Picture a typical Costco store, with aisles and aisles of products stacked to the ceiling as far as you can see. Now, arrange four more Costcos of the same size around it.
And now, take that enormous array of five Costcos — and stack four more on top.
That’s the size of Amazon’s colossal new warehouse on the west side of Interstate 5 in Woodburn, Ore. Five stories tall, 105 feet high, it’s the company’s largest fulfillment center in the Northwest and one of its largest anywhere in the world.
It’s more than four times larger than the warehouse Amazon opened in Troutdale, Ore., six years ago. A bigger warehouse and more advanced robotics, the company says, will reduce the time between when customers place their online orders and when the packages reach doorsteps around the region.
Amazon expects to employ around 1,500 at the Woodburn site when it opens late this year or early in 2025. As operations ramp up, the company expects it could have 2,800 working on-site before long and as many as 3,500 Woodburn employees during busy periods.
Some neighbors in the small community eye the 3.8 million-square-foot facility with apprehension, worried that the flood of employees and Amazon’s fleet of trucks and vans will add to traffic congestion in and out of Woodburn.
City leaders hear those concerns but insist they’ve been planning for this for years. They see the new warehouse as the culmination of a long-term plan to broaden Woodburn’s property tax base, add new city services and make the local economy less reliant on low-paying agricultural jobs.
“The facility’s an impressive sight on I-5, but it took a decade of work for the city to be ready to have a strategy for industrial development,” said Scott Derickson, Woodburn’s city administrator.
One of Oregon’s biggest buildings
Amazon’s Woodburn building is mostly empty right now, five stories of open floor plans that stretch for hundreds of yards. Robotics teams start arriving this week to outfit the warehouse to handle a cascade of products and packages.
The company began construction in July 2021, intending to have the Woodburn site operating by the end of last year. But Amazon changed course in the middle of building, opting to install more advanced robotics to handle more packages, more rapidly.
That pushed the opening date to the end of 2024, or maybe a little later. Meanwhile, in nearby Canby, Ore., Amazon shelved plans for a 517,000-square-foot warehouse amid a downturn in online orders in the pandemic’s aftermath.
Amazon calls the Woodburn site PDX8. It will be one of the largest buildings in Oregon, about four-fifths the size of Intel’s D1X semiconductor factory in Hillsboro. Amazon says the $500 million it has spent in Woodburn so far reflects just a portion of the project’s final cost.
PDX8 is part of the 11th generation of Amazon’s fulfillment center and will incorporate a relatively new robotics technology known as Robin. Robots identify packages on a conveyor belt and big robotic arms pluck out items for specific packages — then send them to Amazon employees who box them up for customer orders.
“We’re bringing the work to the employee,” said Amazon spokesperson Leigh Anne Gullett.
Amazon’s warehouses have been a focus of complaints for many years from workers who say repetitive physical tasks lead to injuries. A 2019 report by the investigative news organization Reveal found the rate of injuries at Amazon’s PDX9 warehouse in Troutdale to be especially high.
Amazon wants robots to take over the most strenuous work so that employees aren’t walking long distances or lifting heavy items, according to Gullett.
Hiring won’t start in Woodburn for at least a few months. Amazon said it will eventually be looking for workers to stow, pick, pack and sort packages, paying hourly wages between $17 and $28. The company offers various benefits and tuition assistance programs to workers who are in school.
Traffic concerns
The thousands of people who will go to work at PDX8 in the coming years will dramatically shift the economy of the small community, about 30 miles south of Portland.
People in the Willamette Valley may know Woodburn primarily for its outlet mall, just north of Amazon’s new facility. But it’s a largely agricultural community of about 27,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 60% are Latino.
City leaders have been working for years to diversify the region’s economy and property tax base. In 2015, they completed a new interchange on I-5 to accommodate more traffic and reached a deal with land conservationists to expand Woodburn’s urban growth boundary and add the industrial land Amazon now occupies.
But unlike other small Oregon communities, Woodburn didn’t offer Amazon a big property tax break. The City Council removed Amazon’s site from Woodburn’s local enterprise zone, making it ineligible for tax breaks that could have been worth tens of millions of dollars.
Amazon came anyway, donating $1 million to renovate a local soccer field and agreeing to pay $15 million to upgrade a highway interchange near PDX8 and make other changes to improve traffic flow. (Amazon did secure a tax break that exempts the company from most property taxes until the warehouse is open.)
Still, Woodburn residents and business owners say they’re watching closely to see how the new warehouse will affect their lives and livelihoods.
“Our biggest concern is the traffic it’s going to cause and if it’ll have them zipping down our driveway and things like that,” said Jacob Pletcher, owner of the nearby BC Hop Ranch.
Even without Amazon, traffic backs up along I-5 near Woodburn’s outlet mall during the holiday season. Amazon’s busy holiday period coincides with the mall’s.
“I think traffic is a reasonable concern to have, for sure,” said Derickson, the city administrator. But he said transportation upgrades were built with Amazon in mind. And the company says it will stagger employees’ shifts so people aren’t all arriving and leaving at the same time.
Traffic isn’t the only thing in Woodburn that’s on the rise. The city’s budget is set to increase in the next year by more than a third, to $175 million. Derickson said that’s because of tax revenue and development charges associated with industrial and housing growth.
Very little of that new revenue comes from Amazon, though, since it isn’t paying most property taxes until its new warehouse is ready to open.
Woodburn expects Amazon’s taxes will eventually help it pay for more public amenities and that the new jobs will attract health care providers and other private services to the city. Woodburn plans to ask voters to approve a $40 million bond for a new community center in November, and the city is hopeful Amazon’s taxes with help cover those payments.
Amazon’s arrival is the payoff of years of planning, according to Woodburn Mayor Frank Lonergan.
“It means a lot for our economic growth. We’ve been trying to position ourselves over the years with our urban growth boundaries to bring in big business,” he said.
Amazon will change Woodburn, Lonergan acknowledged, but in a way the city has been working toward for more than a decade.
“I’m hoping that this is just the beginning,” he said, “that we can continue to grow and, with Amazon here, we’ll continue to bring in other big business.
Mike Rogoway covers Oregon technology and the state economy. Reach him at mrogoway@oregonian.com.