Steve Badgley has been hunting for a larger warehouse in the Denver area for more than a year. But his construction-supply business keeps getting squeezed out by a new entrant into the real-estate market: the marijuana industry.

Since voters in Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use of the drug in 2012, growers and distributors have gobbled up most of the available warehouse space in the Denver area, a major logistics hub for companies moving goods between the Midwest and the West Coast.

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