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"Our role as a real estate owner, investor, and developer is to stay close to our customers, listen to what they need, and make sure we are building, operating, and owning the facilities that customers and logistics companies want to have near the ports."
- Ronel Borner, CenterPoint's East Region SVP of Asset Management
Inbound Logistics reports on how several of America's busiest ports are navigating economic headwinds, optimizing operations to effectively handle today's TEU volumes, and investing heavily in expansion initiatives to meet future demands.
CenterPoint’s East Region SVP of Asset Management, Ronel Borner, was among the experts and officials featured in a report by Inbound Logistics about how several of America’s busiest ports are navigating economic headwinds, optimizing operations to effectively handle today’s TEU volumes, and investing heavily in expansion initiatives to meet future demands.
Read the full article below, spotlighting CenterPoint’s port-adjacent developments, the operations and growth at Georgia Ports Authority, Port of Long Beach, Port Tampa Bay, and Port Everglades.
Far more than cargo docks, ports and port-supporting organizations lift their communities and spur economic development.
In today’s increasingly complex geopolitical environment and amid competing domestic priorities, defining the scope and scale of the work that ports and supporting organizations do is anything but simple.
From their 17th-century origins as colonial outposts, U.S. ports have evolved into much more than gateways for trade. Today, they function as economic engines helping to drive regional development, increasing the competitiveness and the assets of their communities.
Consequently, today’s port leaders must be experts not only in maritime operations, supply chain activities, and logistics, but also in economic development, public finance, and strategic planning.
One compelling example is the Port of Cleveland (formally known as the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority), a key Great Lakes hub and the only full-service container port on Lake Erie.
According to its 2025 Impact Report, released in summer 2026, the agency financed projects with nearly $339.3 million in bond funding, supporting projects with a combined value of $781.7 million. Records also show the port authority approved bond financing for several additional regional projects, including a mixed-use campus adjacent to the Cleveland Browns’ practice facility in suburban Berea, about a dozen miles from downtown Cleveland.
Issuing bonds is an important community development financing tool for ports; state law grants them that authority. But a port’s direct economic impact on its community still primarily stems from the infrastructure the port develops and maintains, along with the employment and logistics activity generated by port operations and the supply chains they support. Development finance complements these core functions by facilitating investments that fuel broader regional economic growth.
Despite the outsized economic influence of ports nationwide—achieved through both the financing tools they deploy and their own operations—the communities they serve may often overlook their contributions. According to port expert Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Ph.D., this oversight occurs in part because the fundamental nature of port-related economic activity has changed over time.
“If you looked at ports a century ago, they generated a great deal of direct economic impact,” says Rodrigue, professor, Department of Maritime Business Administration, Texas A&M University-Galveston. “Everything was centered around the ports, and most of the communities were very well aware [of their impact]. They saw it.”
Today, globalization has extended supply chains far beyond the waterfront. “We have record traffic figures, but ports have more and more of a difficult time linking their activity with their local communities,” Rodrigue says.
Containers arriving at a port are often transferred almost immediately to destinations hundreds or even thousands of miles away, he points out, making a port’s local economic contribution less apparent.
“Port directors work in a complex and constantly changing environment,” writes Geraldine Knatz, Ph.D., in a chapter of Rodrigue’s ports textbook, Port Economics, Management and Policy.
“The chief executive of a port, whether the position is called executive director or CEO, sometimes both, must juggle competing demands from customers, board members, stakeholders, staff, and, in some cases, one or more overseeing governmental authorities,” writes Knatz, professor of the Practice of Policy and Engineering, a joint appointment between the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy and the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Knatz writes from experience: She served as the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014. She also was the managing director of the Port of Long Beach.
Among the diverse qualifications required of port directors, Knatz recognizes the need for political savvy: “While a port executive might share some common characteristics with a private-sector CEO position, such as prestige and salary, the growing public awareness and participation in port activities, coupled with greater diversity among port board membership, has resulted in increased politicization of the port director’s position,” she writes.
For manufacturers and their logistics providers—who are important forces in regional economies themselves—an understanding of the multiple functions of ports is essential as they navigate the political processes that help determine how ports can best meet their needs.
As shippers work to come to terms with that equation, they partner with port directors, political officials, commercial real estate developers, and other business leaders in joint efforts to ensure the strength of ports in job creation, supply chain efficiencies, and community growth is not only safeguarded but enhanced.
“A key challenge facing U.S. ports today is navigating evolving government regulations and tariffs, and assessing how those policies will influence both cargo throughput and the overall composition of goods moving through major ports,” says Ronel Borner, East Region Asset Management Senior Vice President, CenterPoint Properties. CenterPoint acquires, develops, and manages state-of-the-art industrial facilities near major transportation nodes, ports, and population centers in America’s top industrial markets.
“There is also real uncertainty around how shipping lines will respond—not only by shifting cargo from different origins, but by determining the most efficient way to move goods through U.S. ports and into U.S. distribution channels,” Borner adds.
As a driving force in economic development in key locations across the country, CenterPoint must have strong relationships with the ports in the communities it serves.
“Our role as a real estate owner, investor, and developer is to stay close to our customers, listen to what they need, and make sure we are building, operating, and owning the facilities that customers and logistics companies want to have near the ports,” Borner says.
Fostering strong relationships with ports positions the company to help its customers execute the strategies they need to respond to government policies and regulations that shape the community. Historically, the firm has focused a significant portion of its investment dollars on port-centric assets, recognizing the nexus between port activity and the demand for logistics real estate.
At the same time, CenterPoint’s platform has evolved to include major population and distribution hubs, expanding to major population centers that also drive the need for logistics real estate in cities like Atlanta and Chicago.
In the Chicago metropolitan community, for example, CenterPoint built a master-planned intermodal freight terminal, the 6,400-acre CenterPoint Intermodal Center in Joliet and Elwood, Illinois, constituting the largest inland port in North America.
The combination of port proximity, inland infrastructure, and access to major consumption centers enables CenterPoint to support both port-driven supply chains and broader regional development. “One of the clearest trends we’re seeing in port-related logistics is a much greater focus on efficiency within existing footprints,” Borner says. “Our customers are spending a lot of time looking at the space they already have and asking how they can make it work harder for them.”
CenterPoint partners closely with customers as they work through operational optimization. “With more than 60 million square feet nationally, we’re focused on offering logistics companies a portfolio of distribution and warehouse assets in the country’s most competitive infill industrial submarkets, near dense population centers and key local and regional transportation hubs,” Borner says.
He cites Savannah as a good example of how CenterPoint has been able to invest around key port infrastructure. Over the past several years, CenterPoint has executed a multi-building park strategy less than three miles from the Port of Savannah, giving customers direct access to one of the country’s most important logistics gateways.
The park started with the construction of a build-to-suit facility for Maersk, then a facility for Port City Logistics, and most recently a long-term build-to-suit lease with Gulfstream Aerospace for a new 400,000-square-foot facility.
CenterPoint also has a pad-ready site that can accommodate two build-to-suit facilities just three miles from the Port and adjacent to a Norfolk Southern rail yard.
Read more about how several of America’s busiest ports are navigating economic uncertainty, optimizing operations to handle today’s volume, and investing in expansion plans to meet future demands.
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