New Jersey used to be known as "the nation's medicine chest," but over the last two decades, many of the state's pharmaceutical industry jobs have dried up or moved elsewhere and left millions of square feet of office space, warehouses and laboratories sitting empty.
One of those sites is the 116-acre corporate campus of the Swiss drug maker Roche in Nutley, N.J. There are dozens of buildings on this campus, 10 miles west of midtown Manhattan. In fact, there are enough bio and chem labs, offices and auditoriums to fill up the entire Empire State Building. But since December, all of that space — 2 million square feet of it — has been vacant, the laboratories dark and the sidewalks deserted.
"When this was a thriving site, this sidewalk would have been busy with folks walking up and down," says Darien Wilson, one of just 38 Roche employees still working at the site as the company tries to sell the property. "We had great amenities for people, like on-site childcare, you had dinners to-go where you could order food by lunch and take it home with you if you were working late. We had dry cleaning," he says.
Five years ago, Roche acquired Genentech, moved its management to San Francisco and started to slowly withdraw from New Jersey. That's a pretty typical story for what's been happening in the state. In the last 20 years, New Jersey went from having more than 20 percent of U.S. pharma manufacturing jobs to less than 10 percent.
"Essentially, every time there's a merger or one company acquires another company, there's a reduction in force, and there's been furious mergers and acquisitions in the pharma industry, particularly over the past 10 years," says James Hughes, dean of the school of public policy at Rutgers.
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