From McDonnell Douglas to Anduril: the second life of Long Beach's aerospace real estate

Long Beach was an aerospace manufacturing town before "Space Beach" was a phrase anyone used. Douglas Aircraft built here for decades, and Boeing ran C-17 production out of the area until that line wound down years ago. What is happening now is not a new industry arriving from nothing, it is a second life for the same real estate and the same skilled labor pool.

Why the old buildings still work

Buildings constructed for large-scale aircraft assembly were built with power capacity and clear height that most modern speculative warehouse product simply does not have, because nobody builds a new warehouse today assuming a customer will need to assemble a fuselage inside it. That makes decades-old industrial stock near the airport genuinely well suited to today's aerospace and defense tenants, not despite its age but because of what it was originally built to do.

The labor side of the story

The same is true of the workforce. A region that trained generations of aerospace machinists, engineers, and technicians did not lose that labor pool when the last McDonnell Douglas and Boeing lines wound down, and CSU Long Beach's Space Beach initiative is actively building on it with new partnerships. Companies like Voyager, True Anomaly, and Anduril are not building a workforce from scratch, they are drawing on one that was already here.

What this means if you own legacy industrial space

If your building dates back to that earlier aerospace era, its age may be exactly what makes it valuable to this tenant pool, rather than a liability to price around. Before assuming an older building needs to be modernized to compete, it is worth getting a straight read on whether its original specs, power and clear height especially, already match what today's aerospace and defense tenants are asking for.