Three years ago, Taylor Stepp says, digging through city council minutes for signs of opposition to an industrial project wasn’t a routine part of site selection. Now it is standard.
“It is a standard component of every project that we work on,” said Stepp, founder of Strategic Development Partners, a boutique site selection and incentives firm. “We do a deep analysis of what’s being said in the community, the hot topics in the community, because it is a risk.”
That’s only one way the location decision has changed. Projects are bigger. Companies are more sophisticated about where they locate. Power, sometimes down to the availability of a particular transformer, can outweigh cost. And communities outside the country’s superstar metros may suddenly have an opening as companies search for labor, infrastructure and places hungry enough for investment to get a complicated project done.
Stepp joined Location Decision for a conversation about what he’s seeing from inside the site-selection process.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
LOCATION DECISION: When you look at the projects crossing your desk in 2026, what is materially different from three or four years ago?
TAYLOR STEPP: The scale of projects is significantly larger. They’re more advanced in the level of sophistication of what clients are looking for, and they’re a lot more laser-focused on the key drivers of the project.
Whether it comes to access to waterways or rail or a specific type of skill set, clients have a much better perspective on precisely what they are looking for, where to find it and what will really make their final operations successful.
It’s really been incredible to see the scale grow exponentially just in a few years.
LD: Is that partly because companies themselves have gotten better at site selection?
STEPP: I think so. The rise of boutique site-selection firms that have promulgated the industry and educated a lot of folks over the last 15 or 20 years has been really helpful in building more sophisticated clients.
You’re not just looking at your standard Fortune 500 or Fortune 1,000 companies. You’re starting to see a lot more midsized companies employ the art and science behind site selection and credits and incentives to make smart decisions.
That’s out of necessity. Because the practice of credits and incentives are now more in the public domain, you really need those tools to be competitive amongst your peers.
LD: What is hardest to find right now: land, power, people or infrastructure?
STEPP: I would say it’s still power.
And I would dive deeper into that and say a site that is well positioned for quick speed to market on power. Sometimes that comes down to who has transformers — which power provider has the right type of transformer earlier in the process.
I was working on a megaproject where the client could get speed to market a year earlier in one very high-tax, high-cost state. They chose the site to get speed to market 12 months earlier from a transformer perspective.
That’s really the name of the game right now. Getting those transformers in place quickly can win a deal.
LD: Are companies eliminating entire regions earlier because they know certain constraints simply won’t fit their timeline?
STEPP: Yes. And as government grows, I think you’re seeing geographies continue to eliminate themselves because of decisions.
We’re increasingly hearing about companies making decisions to eliminate places that have moratoriums on data centers from their selection criteria. A lot of companies really believe in this movement of reindustrialization. They’re paying attention to politics. They’re paying attention to regulatory decisions and the energy grid that they’re locating in.
It’s really fascinating.
LD: Data centers have become intensely political. Does that cool down after the midterms, or are we looking at a longer political fight over industrial development?
STEPP: I think this is going to be an issue for the next several years, and I think this will probably go through the next presidential election.
The national conversation will expand from being less data-center focused and become more industrially focused.
There’s really going to need to be a national conversation on: Do we want to reindustrialize as a country, or do we want to maintain the current status quo?
I think that will be really fascinating.
LD: With the enormous capital numbers attached to some of these projects, is that changing the relationship between companies and the states competing for them?
STEPP: It depends on the industry. With a lot of these data-center projects, incentives are increasingly harder to find and harder to get because of legislative and executive changes.
But when it comes to major semiconductor projects, states are having to do things that they’ve never done before. They’re stepping in with really unique and expansive programs.
One example is Ohio, where I’m at. They changed megaproject legislation to allow it to be over a 30-year period.
You’re seeing states become a lot more competitive for these select industries where they really want to land projects. Steel is another industry where you’re seeing a lot of movement. Pharmaceuticals, life sciences, the chemical supply chain.
States are more aggressive on these megaprojects because of the huge supply chains that are built out. Folks are realizing that winning one of these deals, you’re really winning 30 deals because of all the supply chains coming with these projects.
LD: We’ve also started seeing government become much more directly intertwined with individual industrial investments and trade-driven projects. What does that do to the traditional site-selection process?
STEPP: A lot of these trade deals that have been announced, the massive investments that the U.S. government and Japan made, Stargate, the SoftBank energy announcement in Ohio — I think this shows the interesting and deepening relationship between government and private industry, trade relationships and reindustrialization.
You’re going to see more of it.
Regardless of whether we have a Republican in the White House in 2028 or a Democrat, you’re going to see more of these government-entwined deals, which will cause some interesting ramifications in site selection.
LD: When you evaluate incentives today, does another $50 million or $100 million move the needle the way it once did? Or have fundamentals become more important?
STEPP: I would say fundamentals are more important.
An interesting component is how tax-conscious the clients are. We interact with clients who aren’t necessarily interested in a very detailed tax breakdown between five or six states. There are certainly clients who are interested in that. You have some clients that really just want to show the big number on a page. You have some that will do the in-depth tax analysis and bake incentives into that conversation.
But then you have some that want that transformer a year earlier.
With speed to market being such a big deal, the fundamentals of the market are really what’s pushing decisions.
I do advise my community clients that it is the community and economic developer’s responsibility — and folks in my shoes as well — to articulate the tax benefits of a jurisdiction relative to the incentives.
Sometimes we’re handed five or six offer letters, and you have one state providing a $5 million tax credit and you’re comparing that to another state that doesn’t even have that tax.
That can get really complicated.
LD: Community opposition has become a huge issue, particularly around data centers. How sophisticated has pre-announcement community-risk analysis become?
STEPP: Three years ago, this wasn’t even really on anyone’s radar.
It was not part of the traditional due-diligence perspective to go evaluate and read city council meeting minutes and try to smell any hint of NIMBYism toward industrial projects.
But it is a standard component of every project that we work on now. We do a deep analysis of what’s being said in the community, the hot topics in the community, because it is a risk.
If you’re in my shoes and you provide a finalist site and the company gets embarrassed because of out-of-left-field negative community sentiment, you’re going to get fired.
It is an increasingly important part of the due diligence of a project.
LD: You use a phrase I really like: “the pioneer’s dilemma.” What is that?
STEPP: We look for other companies that have made investments in that community of late.
If you have a good track record of having blue-chip companies invest in the community and those projects go well without a hitch, then you’re much better positioned.
If you have a dearth of industry making announcements in your community, it’s another risk point because it presents a pioneer’s dilemma: the risk of being the first entry into a market, or the first entry into a market in some time.
It creates a big unknown.
The rejection rate because of the fear of the unknown has never been higher. That is a criterion that has skyrocketed — not just in the last two years, but in the last six months.
LD: Let’s talk workforce. What are companies telling you that isn’t necessarily making it into the press releases?
STEPP: Workforce is one of the very top factors affecting every project.
What you’re starting to see is companies becoming more interested in mid-metros and more rural areas because they’re starting to see where the labor surpluses are located.
Take a community like the Greater Indianapolis region, which is a significant metro for its area. Why not look in Southern Indiana? It’s a bit of a ways away from Indianapolis, has a historical heavy-industry footprint, and you don’t have a new nine- or 10-figure announcement every few months like the Indianapolis metro does.
You’re starting to see a lot more value being found in these tertiary markets.
I think you’re seeing the rise of the mid-metro and the rise of the rural region as these urban areas that just keep winning — these superstar regions — start running into limits.
How many more big projects can Austin, Texas, win? You’re going to run out of people.
It’s much easier to go to a second- or third-tier city and do a good project and have your pick of the litter on the workforce.
LD: Are those superstar metros becoming harder places to do business?
STEPP: Bigger cities are harder to do business in because I feel like communities in many of those states have more leverage than they did in a pre-COVID world.
Citizens are more picky about the types of projects they want to see. Folks aren’t just as hungry for new jobs in a lot of these locales.
I’m really an advocate for those tertiary markets because in those markets, you can be a total game changer and set the tone for a region with one of these big projects — and, frankly, have a lot of concierge service from state and local governments, which can make a huge difference today.
LD: Last question. What story about America’s industrial rebuild do you think isn’t being told?
STEPP: The role of the economic developer is not really fundamentally understood in our society.
There’s a joke that my family and I have. We’ll look at a vacant store or a piece of property and say, “What are they going to do there?”
Well, the “they” is economic development.
The “they” are the economic developers who are at the grassroots level making decisions about zoning, land use, property redevelopment and economic development strategy that are driving communities.
When I got started nearly 20 years ago, it was a much different ecosystem. You had these one-off efforts. Many communities didn’t have a real program.
Now you have very sophisticated programs that are developing property, building hotels, doing mixed-use entertainment districts that are really driving their communities from a ground-up level.
I don’t think there’s an understanding in society of where a lot of this growth comes from, how these partnerships are managed and how much influence is really there at the local economic-development level.
You’re also starting to see more and more political races have major inflection points around things like data centers, industrial policy, NIMBYism and incentives.
If we had an influence meter, maybe economic development was down here pre-COVID, and now it just continues to gain more influence at the local, regional, state and national level.
I’m bullish about the profession. I’m bullish about what the industry can mean for reindustrialization.
This is a growing part of our civic society that I think needs to be celebrated.
About Taylor Stepp
Taylor Stepp is founder of Strategic Development Partners, a boutique site-selection and credits-and-incentives firm. The firm works with corporate clients on location and incentive decisions and advises communities on issues including housing, incentives, sites and buildings.