10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times BREAKING NEWS Traffic nightmare on 405 through the Sepulveda Pass due to Getty fire CALIFORNIA When your house is surrounded by massive warehouses Some Fontana residents say they’ve suered as the Inland Empire has become a national logistics hub. (Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times) By PALOMA ESQUIVEL STAFF WRITER OCT. 27, 2019 9:25 AM tanding under an aging pavilion in the backyard of the home she’s lived in for 54 years, S Mary Anita Valdepeña let out a deep sigh and said she’d rather not be there. “It’s too depressing,” she said. Her family used to gather in the yard to celebrate birthdays and holidays, under the shade of the mulberry trees her husband planted, the rounded peak of Mt. Baldy in the background. These days, the yard is overgrown with dandelions, the mulberries are dying and her view is the towering concrete wall of a warehouse. A line of semi truck trailers is parked nearby against https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 1/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times another, shorter, concrete wall at her property line. And from where she stands, there’s a constant hum — a truck rumbles, tires squeak, a forklift beeps, metal hits metal. Mary Anita Valdepeña said after an adjacent warehouse was built, the condition of her Fontana yard deteriorated, as did her quality of life. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times) ..................ADVERTISEMENT.... .... .... Valdepeña,... 79, said she. doesn’t.. go outside unless.. she. has to, or even .open. .the windows. Doing... so lets in the smell of fumes from idling engines and the sounds of trucks docking and unloading late. into the night. “You want to know about the warehouses? They ruined my life,” she said. The noise, the air pollution and the trucks are a daily reality for the dozens of working-class, mostly Latino residents of Rose Avenue in south Fontana. They have been surrounded by warehouses in the last five years as the Inland Empire has been transformed into a national logistics hub, with local officials jockeying to roll out the red carpet for the industry. The warehouses have brought thousands of jobs to a place where residents have often struggled with high unemployment and long commutes. Their proliferation makes it possible for Southern https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 2/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Californians to buy something online and have it arrive at their doors within hours. Arianna Diaz, 3, pets family horses in her backyard, which now abuts a giant warehouse. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) But the industrial boom has brought warehouse projects closer to homes, despite health warnings from state air quality officials, who recommend against housing people within 1,000 feet of such facilities because of harmful truck pollution. ADVERTISEMENT In Fontana, where Mayor Acquanetta Warren prides herself on being nicknamed “Warehouse Warren,” developers have dramatically reshaped the city, buying dozens of single-family homes, horse properties, chicken ranches and other small businesses and tearing them down to build millions of square feet of distribution centers for Amazon, UPS and others. Developers offered to buy Valdepeña’s home and those of her neighbors, but they refused to sell, and the warehouses went up around them. In Valdepeña’s case, one warehouse’s perimeter wall is right at her property line, 150 feet from her back window. “Boxed. We’re boxed in from either direction,” said Josie Kuhl, 64, who has lived on Rose Avenue for 30 years. “We hear the forklifts at night. The rumbling of trucks when they’re docking, it’s just nonstop.” https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 3/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Jerry Denney, in the frontyard of his 35-year Fontana home, has a view of a warehouse and hears trucks day and night. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) Through the decades, Fontana has undergone continual reinvention — from the small town that drew Angelenos east with the promise of a more rural life, to one of the largest steel producers in the nation during World War II, to a working-class bedroom community for L.A. and Orange counties. The warehouses, as Warren sees it, will once again remake Fontana: from a community whose residents face arduous commutes into a city where they just cross the street to get to work. Warren was born in Compton and left in 1993, the year after jurors acquitted LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King, sending angry residents into the streets. “My kids, I had to get them out of there,” she said. She took a job with the city of Upland and settled in Fontana, where she said she was drawn to the trees, the parks and the family-oriented community. ... ... ADVERTISEMENT... ... ... ...................... .... .... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution. 4/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Truck trac has increased significantly on Etiwanda Avenue as the number of warehouses has grown. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times) In 2011, the year after she became mayor, Warren was invited to her first ribbon-cutting, a grand opening of Anna’s Linens. She thought she was going to a retail store, she said. It wasn’t until she arrived that she realized it was a massive warehouse. The company’s CEO pulled her aside and described the extent to which distributors were already quietly settling in her town, she recalled. “He told me, ‘We’re moving product and distributing throughout the United States right here in Fontana,’” Warren said. “I had goosebumps when I left there. I think I’m onto something.” She went to the Chamber of Commerce and to City Council members and started looking for ways to make Fontana accommodating to warehouse development, she said. Warren faced a recall effort in 2017 over what her critics called “reckless residential and warehouse development.” They criticized her for taking large amounts of campaign money from developers, but the mayor remains popular and undeterred. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 5/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times In the last five years, distribution centers have been squeezing out Fontana residents. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) “They started calling me ‘Warehouse Warren,’ and at first I was like, ‘Wow, they’re killing our jobs here.’ But then I said, ‘You know what, I like that name.’ And I started going with it,” Warren said. “People tell me, ‘I used to be on the freeway two hours going to Orange County,’ and now they go home for lunch.” During a driving tour of the city, she pointed out the Sierra Lakes Commerce Center, a new nearly 600,000-square-foot warehouse project on the city’s north side. “Look how beautiful, right across from the housing,” she said, waving at a large tract across the street. She later directed the driver to Jurupa Avenue, a major road in south Fontana. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 6/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Big rigs pass schoolchildren waiting at a bus stop in Fontana. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) “It used to be when people would come here, all of this was a hot mess. One night, a goat ran out in front of my car,” Warren said. “Now … look how clean it is.” The north side of the street was a line of new warehouses. On the south side was a tract with hundreds of single-family homes. Tucked behind one warehouse, invisible from the street, were the about three dozen homes in the Rose Avenue neighborhood. Just down the street, about half a dozen boarded-up homes sat behind a chain link fence. A sign on the fence announced that three warehouses, totaling 1.1 million square feet, would soon be put in their place. Nearby was St. Mary Catholic Church, where officials said they too had been approached by developers wanting to buy the property. They turned down the offer. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 7/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Boarded-up homes in the city will be replaced by 1.1 million square feet of warehouses. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times ) In the last decade, more than 150 million square feet of industrial space, the vast majority of it warehouses, has been built in the Inland Empire, according to real estate services company CBRE. In that time, about 54 warehouses have been built or are under construction in Fontana, totaling about 16 million square feet, and about 100 homes have been sold and demolished to make way for those projects, city officials said. Warren acknowledged that there had been some “growing pains” related to development — but she dismissed most criticism. The city follows state and federal law when it comes to these projects, she said. And air pollution, she said, gets swept away by wind. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution 8/15 10/28/2019 Warehouses surround Fontana and Inland Empire neighborhoods - Los Angeles Times Motorists contend with truck trac on Etiwanda Avenue south of the 60 Freeway.