Zoning in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania: Municipal Control and the Warehouse Boom

Zoning here is a purely municipal decision -- and that cuts both ways

Lehigh County has 24 municipalities -- Allentown plus 22 boroughs and townships -- and every one of them writes, adopts, and enforces its own zoning ordinance under the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code, with no county-level zoning ordinance sitting behind or above any of them. In practice, this means Lehigh County's zoning map is really 24 separate maps, each reflecting that municipality's own priorities, growth pressure, and history. A township with a large amount of land zoned for light industrial or general industrial use decades ago, when that designation mattered far less, can find itself at the center of a very different kind of development pressure today than the one its zoning code was written to manage.

That's precisely the situation in much of the Lehigh Valley today. Industrial zoning districts adopted years or decades before the current warehouse boom simply listed warehouses as a permitted use -- a reasonable, low-controversy choice at the time -- without anticipating that a single logistics building could eventually mean millions of square feet, heavy truck traffic, and a genuinely different land-use character for a formerly quiet industrial corner of a township.

The scale of the Lehigh Valley warehouse boom, and why townships can't simply say no

Since 2015, roughly 44 million square feet of industrial and warehouse space has been approved across Lehigh and Northampton Counties combined -- more than 1,000 acres of new building footprint -- and the logistics sector now rivals healthcare as the Lehigh Valley's second-largest employer, driven by the region's position at the crossroads of I-78 and Route 22 and its reach into both the New York and Philadelphia metro markets. A specific and important legal wrinkle makes this hard to simply reverse: Pennsylvania's zoning law generally restricts what a municipality can do to reject a proposed use that its own zoning code already allows, so a township whose industrial district permits warehouses as of right has genuinely limited tools to turn down a new warehouse application on that land, however much local opposition it generates.

Some townships have responded by amending their zoning going forward -- Lower Nazareth Township in neighboring Northampton County, for example, was reported as the first of a wave of municipalities there to explicitly ban future warehouse construction in a specific light-industrial zoning district, after already accumulating roughly 25 warehouses within a 14-square-mile radius. Whether a specific Lehigh County township has made or is considering a similar zoning-text change is worth asking about directly, since it can shift what's actually buildable on industrially zoned land there from one council meeting to the next.

What to check before buying land near an industrial corridor here

Three concrete steps: (1) confirm a parcel's current zoning district and, specifically, whether warehouse or logistics use is a permitted (as-of-right) use in that district today -- not just whether the district is labeled "industrial," since permitted-use lists vary; (2) ask the municipality directly whether any zoning-text amendment restricting or banning warehouse development in that district is pending or under discussion, since Lehigh Valley townships have moved in that direction in response to the current boom; and (3) if buying land specifically because of its warehouse-development potential, verify current zoning rather than assuming a use is allowed just because a neighboring parcel already has a warehouse -- adjacent parcels can sit in different zoning districts with different rules.