UCR: Inland Empire Builder
It’s not really news that the fastest economic growth in California this year will be in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The Inland Empire has been expanding in population and employment for years as affordable housing has attracted new residents.
Indeed, you can judge the Inland Empire’s present by the fearsome buildup of commuter traffic on freeways linking it with Los Angeles and Orange counties to the west.
But the region’s changing outlook and its future as one of the most interesting areas of Southern California are news. And you can glimpse that future in the constant building and planning of UC Riverside.
UCR is building a research park, with wet labs for biotechnology firms and Internet-ready offices for start-ups in information technology, chemistry and other disciplines. One aim is to stop venture capitalists from telling local companies to escape to Orange County or Northern California if they want financing.
UCR’s engineering school is leading the way in environmental research on alternative fuels. The university is building a center for entrepreneurial management in Palm Desert. It is starting a law school.
UCR is innovating in education. Its school of education is teaching management courses for principals, administrators and teachers because the average elementary or high school these days is a big business that requires management skills.
UCR is reaching out. It has more African American and Latino students--the “underrepresented minorities”--than any other UC school, even though at 9,550 students it has the smallest enrollment in the UC system.
Riverside achieves that distinction because its chancellor, Raymond Orbach, practices affirmative outreach, not affirmative action. Orbach, who has led UCR for eight years, visits high schools in California’s Central Valley and the San Gabriel Valley, in East and South Los Angeles, as well as his home territory, to recruit UC-qualifying minority students.
“We have a special responsibility to the community,” says Orbach, a Caltech- and UC Berkeley-trained physicist who grew up in Hollywood.
And, he adds, “we must train a work force for the modern economy” of science-based jobs that will characterize the Inland Empire in the decade ahead.
San Bernardino and Riverside counties, a region larger than five New England states, have an economy based heavily on home and commercial construction and the freight handling and warehousing that go with serving as transfer point for goods from Los Angeles and Long Beach ports bound for the rest of the United States.
That warehousing economy has given the Inland Empire less employment and decidedly lower personal income than those of neighboring Orange County, which has fewer people.
But today many things are changing. Warehousing first of all is becoming more sophisticated, demanding greater computer skills than it used to because of Internet-based inventory controls, says economist John Husing, whose San Bernardino firm Economics & Politics Inc. reports regularly on the Inland Empire’s economy.
The next decade will see a shift of industry as Ontario Airport expands freight and passenger service and Orange County declines to do so. Businesses wanting to expand in Orange and Los Angeles counties will move to more reasonably priced land and accommodations in Corona, Temecula, Riverside and other cities in the Inland Empire.
That’s already happening. Timely Technologies, a company providing fiber-optic cables, is moving from Orange County to a site near the UCR campus. “The firm’s 15 owners and employees found that all but one of them already lived in the Inland Empire,” says Michael Beck, UCR’s director of economic development who is overseeing creation of the university’s research park.
UCR itself will be one of the area’s fastest-growing institutions, with enrollment rising more than 100% to 19,900 in 2010.
In addition to environmental research, UCR’s College of Engineering has support from Canada’s Nortel Networks and Taha Information Systems of India for new studies in information sciences.
A $15-million gift from Richard Heckman of Vivendi Water in Palm Desert is launching the UCR business school’s entrepreneurial center in the Coachella Valley.
A $5-million gift from Henry Coil Jr., the head of a local construction company, will create a UCR law school. Riverside and San Bernardino counties have only one lawyer for every 898 people, compared with one lawyer for fewer than 300 people in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.
So UCR will become a greater university--and resource for the region. And it won’t be an ivory tower.
Plans eight years ago were to erect a fence around the university, founded in 1907 as a citrus experimental center and commissioned as a college in 1954. But Orbach, who came from the provost’s post at UCLA, nixed the fence and spent $1 million of UCR’s funds to redevelop a derelict area of abandoned stores adjacent to UCR’s campus.
Today the area is a mini-shopping center with UCR offices and classrooms above its restaurants and coffee shops and a movie theater that serves as lecture hall in the mornings and a cinema evenings and weekends. Half the jobs in the center are reserved for residents of the poor neighborhoods of East Riverside.
“We’re not an island,” Orbach says of the university.
Indeed not, it is an economic engine. In other times, heavy-manufacturing plants provided the multiplier effects of jobs and economic development. Today knowledge and centers of knowledge--such as UC Riverside and the 16 other institutions of higher learning in or near the Inland Empire--provide those multipliers. It’s a region to watch.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
