A former warehouse district is being remade into an urban village in Bellevue.

Seattle city and business leaders lock horns over the future of industrial land even as new condos and high-tech office buildings rise where auto dealerships once stood.

And when they talk about the Kent Valley, where warehouses dot the landscape like dandelions, real estate experts say it's saturated and overpriced.

These are signs of the growing scarcity of industrial land in the Puget Sound region, at least that which is free of political complications and full of infrastructure. So, where to next for new industrial development in the region? Frederickson, that's where.

Fred-what? Frederickson is not a city, but a 12-square-mile unincorporated area 33 miles northeast of Olympia and 18 miles southeast of Tacoma. It's a patchwork of trees, gravel, grass and sleepy neighborhoods.

It's also booming with industrial development and being eyed eagerly as manufacturers and warehouse developers march south, away from Seattle, away from Bellevue, away from the hassles of urban centers that increasingly have no use for big, noisy, squat buildings that take up space and inside which things are made and shipped around the world.

"The Frederickson area is a great area for industrial development," says Tony Kusak, associate director for commercial real-estate brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield. "You're talking about a lot of land, distinctly larger contiguous tracts of land" that's "viable in its current state." Which means, unlike other industrial sites around the state, it needs little prep work for companies to move in.

Already, Frederickson is home to a diverse group of companies, including The Boeing Co., which builds the vertical fin for its new 787 Dreamliner at a plant in the area; Toray Composites (America) Inc., which supplies carbon fiber composite materials to Boeing; Hillstrom Cabinets; James Hardie Industries, a manufacturer of high-tech fiber-cement building materials; Mountain Mist Water Co., which sells bottled water in the U.S., Russia and Asia; and Medallion Foods, which makes pasta and delivers it throughout the U.S. and to foreign markets by way of the Port of Tacoma.

Development has intensified recently. Northwest Door, a maker of steel, wood and aluminum garage doors for residential and commercial buildings, moved into a new 300,000-square-foot manufacturing-distribution warehouse. This year, Ikea opened a distribution center, with Whirlpool to follow suit in 2009.

Why Frederickson? The area is home to reliable employers, boasts backers such as the Port of Tacoma and offers an arguably unmatched amount of undeveloped industrial land in the state that is zoned and permitted properly, studded with rail lines, subdivided into large parcels and free of cranky neighbors -- just the kind of features industrial developers are looking for and that are becoming scarce in more populated areas. About 2,400 acres of land in Frederickson are zoned as an industrial/employment center. Of that, roughly 1,200 acres remain open to development. And of that, about 600 acres are more easily developed because they have few geographical or environmental constraints such as wetlands.

Dick Larman, director of regional services for the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED), says no other industrial site in the state can match the desirability of Frederickson. Work is being done in other parts of the state, including in Lewis County and in eastern Washington, to make industrial sites attractive, but, Larman says, "they're not ready yet."

In fact, Frederickson comes with one major selling point: It is the largest single industrial development site in Puget Sound that is zoned for heavy manufacturing and that has industrial-capacity utilities in place.