Pallet racking in Webster, TX.

Webster is a small Harris County city, 12,499 residents at the 2020 census, that works like a much bigger one. It calls itself the Gateway to NASA: Johnson Space Center sits next door, with a workforce of about 15,000 civil servants, astronauts and contractors, and Webster has been home to aerospace firms including Ad Astra Rocket Company, Leidos, Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin's Exploration Development Laboratory. Its main roads are I-45, Bay Area Boulevard and NASA Parkway, and Medical Center Boulevard, Texas Avenue and Highway 3 hold a cluster of hospitals and rehabilitation facilities the city calls the medical center of the south. The storage that comes out of that mix is not bulk distribution. It is aerospace tooling and flight hardware support, medical supplies and equipment, retail back-stock, and specialty chemical inventory, usually in office/warehouse space rather than big boxes. That means rack that holds odd shapes as well as pallets, clean layouts that can pass a customer audit, and labeling that makes sense to somebody who is not a warehouse person. Webster's Building Division issues commercial permits and requires a certificate of occupancy for any building in use, and its Fire Marshal's Office, which has adopted the 2021 International Fire Code, signs off before that certificate is issued.

In the Clear Lake business district by NASA Parkway, the permit file goes to the City of Webster Building Division. Aerospace, lab and medical stock needs locations you can trace, so deep lanes where the pallet order cannot be checked are usually the wrong choice.