Moreno Valley Job Growth to Rank No. 2, Expert Says : Economy: Much of the Riverside County area’s growth will be siphoned away from Orange County, according to a national study.

Moreno Valley’s reputation is that of a bedroom community stuffed with people who have chosen miserable commutes to jobs in Orange and Los Angeles counties in return for affordable homes.

But that is about to change, and the fast-growing city that sprawls along Interstate 60 in the rocky foothills east of Riverside will be one of the hottest spots in the country for job formation in the coming decade, a nationally known development economist is predicting.

And a lot of the new jobs that will earn the 6-year-old Riverside County community its economic spurs will come out of Orange County, according to David L. Birch, a real estate researcher and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While people once moved to where the jobs were, the trend today is for jobs to follow people--and tens of thousands of people have been moving from Orange and Los Angeles counties into the Moreno Valley area in recent years, Birch said.

Birch’s Cognetics Real Estate Inc. research firm in Cambridge, Mass., recently prepared a forecast of job creation in 1,700 “edge communities”--a growing urban area on the outskirts of a major metropolitan center--across the nation.

The study ranks the Moreno Valley/Perris area second in the country with an estimated 63,000 new jobs by the year 2000. The Las Vegas area was ranked first in job growth.

Birch divides Orange County into 10 areas but lists only one in his ranking of the top 20 job-growth centers in the nation. The Brea-Anaheim-Yorba Linda segment of the county should add 37,000 new jobs by the end of the decade, good enough for 10th place, the study shows.

In addition to Moreno Valley, two other Southland areas outranked the Brea-Anaheim-Yorba Linda area in the study. The San Diego/La Jolla area placed seventh and Ontario/Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County ranked ninth.

Economists at Chapman College in Orange recently predicted that the total number of jobs in Orange County would increase by about 173,000, or 14%, in the next five years, growing to nearly 1.39 million in 1995 from 1.22 million at the end of 1990.

Birch said in a telephone interview after a speech to a Moreno Valley job development conference Wednesday that Orange County will continue to show healthy growth in jobs but will lose a sizable number to Moreno Valley and other outlying areas.

“They are where Orange County was 15 years ago,” he said. “The number of entrepreneurs in Moreno Valley has tripled in the last three years, so a lot of the job growth in the area will come from creation of new companies. But a lot will also come from companies moving from Orange and Los Angeles and even San Diego” as they look for an affordable, educated work force in a less congested location.

He told the nearly 400 business executives and city officials at the job development conference that the growing shortage of blue-collar and middle-management employees in areas like Orange County “is going to drive a lot of employers into your lap, and there will be a tremendous spurt of job growth.”

To ensure that the jobs stay, he said, government and business must work together “to plan development to keep the area looking nice, and not overbuild and destroy the local real estate industry.”