Paying Price of Growth in Inland Empire

The warning signs are everywhere: smog so thick that kids are losing lung capacity; the state’s highest rates of year-round schooling; rapidly worsening traffic.

But as other parts of the region are in full rebellion against sprawl, Southern California’s Inland Empire continues to welcome growth at almost any cost:

* Just as Los Angeles and Orange County residents desperately battle airport expansion plans, inland political leaders and residents cheer projections that the number of passengers at Ontario International Airport will quintuple by 2025.

* South Pasadena civic leaders have held up a proposed extension of the Long Beach Freeway for no less than 30 years--but Inland Empire officials welcome extensions of the Foothill Freeway in central San Bernardino County with ribbon cuttings and flowery speeches.

* And while the proposed 3,050-home Ahmanson Ranch project in eastern Ventura County has become a fierce focus of protest, massive projects are all but routine inland. The Riverside County Board of Supervisors, for example, this summer shrugged off the advice of its own Planning Commission and approved plans for 4,318 homes east of Redlands despite concerns about a limited water supply.

Riverside and San Bernardino counties are now home to 14 of Southern California’s 20 fastest-growing cities, according to the latest census data. Experts expect the population--which is at 3.2 million today, equal to that of Oregon--to double in the next 25 years.

Already, many residents are finding that they haven’t left behind the problems of the city by moving into the Inland Empire’s suburbs. From crime to schools to traffic, they’ve brought those problems along and, in some cases, made them worse.

For years the region has supplied an army of commuters to Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties each morning. Now, many local leaders believe the two inland counties must shift their focus to creating jobs at home, building more schools and roads and nurturing existing communities--not simply building new ones.

“We can’t stick a wall up” between inland and coastal counties, said Max Neiman, a professor of political science at UC Riverside who studies development policy and the effects of growth. “But we need to consider what’s in our best interest.”

Room to Grow

For decades, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have offered a precious commodity in Southern California: elbow room. Today, one-third of the homes built in the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area are built in the Inland Empire.

Experts say three factors have fostered the relentless pace of construction:

* Inland counties are poorer than their coastal cousins, and local officials are hungry for the tax revenue generated by home construction.

* The affordability gap between coastal and inland housing is growing, drawing an increasing share of home buyers to the Inland Empire.

* Big projects are especially attractive to a region that is anxious for recognition as an important metropolitan area. Though the Inland Empire is one of the nation’s biggest population centers, it is still blotted out by Los Angeles, and is barely a blip on the cultural radar.

Over the final five years of the 1990s, local governments in the two counties approved 165,339 permits for residential, commercial or industrial construction.

That’s more than 90 new buildings every day, seven days a week. About half of them were homes.

Most of the growth is in a swath of cities hugging the borders of Los Angeles and Orange counties, from Temecula north to Ontario and Fontana. Demand also continues to grow for homes in rustic outposts farther east, such as Beaumont and Banning, and north in the high desert--where folks still refer to the Los Angeles area as “down below.”

Roy Gobel embodies the trend. As his career in law enforcement was coming to a close, the former LAPD homicide detective embarked on one of his most exhaustive investigations: He spent four years searching for a perfect spot--and an affordable one--where he would retire.

Gobel settled on Sun Lakes Country Club, a 2,600-home, 55-and-older retirement community in Banning. He and his wife, Pat, moved there in February 2000--followed by his parents and four more relatives.

Eight of them in all, they were drawn by the safety of guard gates and roving security patrols. Pat and her sister enjoy the outlet mall in Cabazon, eight minutes away. Roy spends much of his free time at nearby Lake Perris on his 14-foot fishing boat. The golfing is top-notch, they say, the dry weather good for arthritis.

Perhaps most important, the Gobels bought a 2,226-square-foot house for about $200,000--a home they say would have cost more than $350,000 in Orange County.

“After seeing what you get for your money, and after seeing that the quality of life is very attractive, we decided this was it,” Roy Gobel said. “This is the best place for us.”

Signs of Strain

For every one of those stories, however, is one like that of Debbie Litzinger--signs that the strains of growth are catching up with the Inland Empire.

For five years, Litzinger has been commuting from Riverside, where she can afford to own a home, to her office at Ricoh Electronics in Tustin, where she can make enough money to pay for it. The commute, as she puts it, “is the worst thing in the world”--and it’s gotten longer each year.

Traffic has become a way of life, along with incessant freeway construction. More than 40% of inland commuters bob and weave through drives of an hour or more, and 11% commute four to six hours a day. A study in May by the Texas Transportation Institute found that the number of hours the average inland driver spends annually stuck in traffic rose 533% since 1982, to 38 hours.

Litzinger leaves her home at 6:45 a.m., arriving at work just before 8:30 a.m. She gets home at 7 p.m. after spending, all told, between three and four hours in the car. By the time she gets back, her husband and 5-year-old son have had dinner and her son is nearly ready for bed. She dines alone, her dog at her feet.

The lifestyle is mind-numbing.

“I did a few books on tape, and I listen to the radio,” she said. “But here’s the really scary part: I’m so used to the drive now that I don’t even realize it’s happening. All of a sudden I look up and think: Wow, I’m here. And it’s been an hour and a half. How many accidents did I avoid? Or cause? It’s like I have tunnel vision.”

She has endured the commute largely so she and her husband could afford to buy a home--they are preparing to close on a 2-year-old, 2,200-square-foot home for $149,000, while friends in Anaheim just bought a smaller home for $275,000.

Highways are the lifeline of the inland economy--but as the population soars, they have been choked by commuters, truckers and new residents.

The rush “hour” in western stretches of the region, counting mornings and evenings, is eventually expected to last seven hours, according to a recent study by the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas. The average speed on stretches of the notorious Riverside Freeway, which connects the region with Orange County, is expected to slow to 10 mph.

Horrendous traffic is no longer limited to commuting thoroughfares. There are a slew of developing bottlenecks inside the inland region--as anyone trying to reach Moreno Valley from the adjacent city of Riverside on U.S. 60 can attest.

“Gridlock is imminent,” said Borre Winckel, executive director of the Building Industry Assn.’s Riverside County chapter.

A proposal to tunnel under the Cleveland National Forest, backed by some builders, to build a new road to Orange County would cost as much as $2 billion. Riverside County Supervisor Tom Mullen, a driving force behind a nationally acclaimed, multi-agency plan to improve traffic flow, estimates that the cost of making adequate improvements in western Riverside County alone will be $9 billion in the next 20 years.

“We need every penny of that, and probably more,” Mullen said.

That’s where the consensus ends, however, as government officials are deeply divided over how to spend precious road funds.

Many believe the region will remain bearable only if the money is used to improve roads within the inland area instead of expanding commuting routes to other counties.

However, reflecting the clout that developers continue to wield, Riverside County transportation officials decided recently to pursue both avenues. Rejecting the recommendation of their own consultants, who had suggested concentrating on improving transportation within the Inland Empire, the officials decided to forge ahead with plans to build new corridors within the region--as well as an additional commuter corridor linking Riverside and Orange counties.

The decision was made after a bout of lobbying by builders. Winckel told transportation officials that Riverside County would evolve into a “Third World country” without new freeways to other counties.

He also warned committee members not to “cave in to environmental pressure.”

They didn’t.

Bad Air and More

It wasn’t the first time. Activists believe the Inland Empire is evolving into an ecological catastrophe.

For years, experts have noted that car exhaust accumulating in the San Bernardino National Forest accelerates aging in trees, leaving ponderosa pines with fewer needles, sycamores with brown, wilting leaves and forests more susceptible to disease and bugs.

Though much of the smog is blown inland from Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties increasingly are inflicting their own damage on the environment, experts say.

According to recent research by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, nitrogen deposits from car exhaust, among other things, have begun killing native plantains near the city of Riverside. Those plants are the primary source of food for endangered quino checkerspot butterflies in one of their last remaining habitats in the West.

Meantime, the butterflies are trapped--they can’t fly more than five feet off the ground, so they can’t cross the street. The last butterfly colonies in the region are now hemmed in by highways, while their food is killed off by pollution.

Transplanted house cats imported by armies of new residents are feasting on native birds. Lake Elsinore, the largest natural lake in Southern California, has been contaminated by runoff from golf courses and farms.

Near the windmills of the San Gorgonio Pass, the 83-year-old Beaumont Cherry Festival now imports cherries from Washington state as the region’s farms--once a way of life, now a quaint selling point for developers--are edged out by homes and shopping centers.

As housing developments in Hemet and Temecula inch closer to dwindling farmland, residents say the sewage sludge used to fertilize crops is giving them nosebleeds and respiratory problems.

“The issue is no longer this rat or that fly,” said David Hogan, urban wild lands coordinator for the Tucson, Ariz.-based Center for Biological Diversity. “Now it is about the wholesale destruction of ecosystems.”

Though creating local jobs is seen as crucial to easing many of the region’s problems, including pollution, the most successful effort toward that goal has had the opposite effect on air quality, many fear.

In recent years, the region has launched a campaign to create more local work. The effort helped establish 275,000 new positions in the 1990s, 40% of Southern California’s job gain, according to the San Bernardino-based Inland Empire Economic Partnership.

An April survey by the Southern California Assn. of Governments found that jobs are harder to find in the two inland counties. While Los Angeles and Orange counties have nearly three jobs for every two households, the ratio is about one-to-one in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

But the Inland Empire’s campaign to create local work has relied largely on the “logistics” industry--warehouses and trucks for the distribution of goods. Creating the primary distribution sector for the Southwest has meant the construction of dozens of warehouses, many stretching over more than 1 million square feet, where hundreds of diesel trucks pick up shipments each morning.

While local jobs mean shorter commutes and therefore less pollution from cars, scientists are beginning to document how the logistics industry is compounding air-quality woes by dramatically increasing truck traffic.

One recent study showed that children in the unincorporated communities of Mira Loma and nearby Glen Avon have 5% less lung capacity than children in less polluted regions, a trend many attribute in part to the trucks. The South Coast Air Quality Management District found this spring that the air above Mira Loma has the highest levels of particulate pollution in Southern California--a third higher than downtown Los Angeles.

“Everyone here has concentrated on wealth and business,” said Carl Cranor, a philosophy professor at UC Riverside who specializes in regulatory law. “No one is looking at the big picture. There is a very serious problem here.”

Crowded Classrooms

Inland schools have been overwhelmed by an explosion of students--and are driven to extremes to keep pace.

San Bernardino County has, by far, the state’s highest percentage of students enrolled in year-round schools--37%. Riverside County is the next highest, at 33%. The statewide average is 22%.

There is a cost, many believe.

While studies on the educational effects of multitrack schools are mixed, they are unpopular with students and parents. Moreover, many critics say such schedules exacerbate economic disparities: Affluent parents are more able to move their children to schools with traditional calendars.

According to a study by UC Riverside, teachers have been divided along similar lines. The more experienced teachers land in the traditional-calendar school programs, while their junior colleagues cluster in year-round schools.

Year-round schools “have segmented the population--and they have segmented them by wealth and language,” said Doug Mitchell, an education professor at UC Riverside who conducted the study.

Winckel of the Building Industry Assn. says local officials rely too heavily on developers to build schools as part of housing projects. He believes residents should share that responsibility by backing local and state bond initiatives.

While the region debates education financing, however, its inability to build schools fast enough has exacerbated racial disparities.

The Ontario-Montclair School District, for example, which runs kindergarten through eighth-grade classrooms in western San Bernardino County, has grown by about 500 children a year for the last decade. But the district, now the second-largest elementary school district in California, hasn’t built a new school since 1995--and even that one was built merely to replace another school.

Because of the space shortage, the average class size is between 30 and 33 children--and the district will almost certainly be forced to abandon state-mandated class-size reduction efforts for its third-grade classrooms, said Dorothy Leveque, Ontario-Montclair’s assistant superintendent for instruction services.

Last year, the district attempted to pass a bond issue that would have provided money for new schools. Voters rejected it--largely, officials believe, because voters are mostly white, while the people who would benefit from new schools are minorities and newer transplants who vote far less frequently.

Growing Debate

For all the accumulating problems, some inland communities are beginning to question their long-standing faith in the power of growth to solve all problems.

Along the Riverside Freeway, highly visible to weary commuters returning home, is a bright green billboard carrying what has seemed, at times, a revolutionary message: “LIVE and WORK in Riverside County!”

It’s a sign of hope--an advertisement for the county’s new Web site, https://rivcojobs.com, designed to introduce local companies to commuters. For the first time, backers say, the Inland Empire created enough jobs in the 1990s to provide work for the transplants who arrived--a significant milestone.

Riverside County also has launched a nationally recognized Integrated Project, a $20-million effort to balance development and conservation.

That campaign, Winckel said, includes plans to increase traffic flow by implementing a carefully choreographed bus system that would arrive with the regularity of an airport shuttle.

It also calls for financial incentives that could encourage the construction of denser development, such as apartment buildings, instead of single-family homes. That, developers believe, would supplant eastward sprawl with centralized, urban “community centers.”

Increasingly, communities are protecting their own instead of catering to other counties.

Developers are forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars per house in impact fees, money that is used to shore up roads and schools. Victorville saw a $335,000 increase in sales tax revenue last fall, a 13% increase, after a campaign encouraging residents to spend locally.

In Beaumont, Pardee Homes recently forged a deal expected to yield 4,716 homes--adding 13,000 new residents to a dusty, rustic town with a population of 11,000. However, there will also be 65 acres of parks and trails, and space for libraries, schools and fire stations, said Beaumont Planning Director Ernie Egger.

In all, many believe that local governments and residents are turning a corner--refining their taste in growth from any and all to high-end development and white-collar jobs.

“I think we are getting more and more self-sufficient,” said Sarah Mundy, the Riverside County Economic Development Agency’s marketing director. “We see a shift. We see people being able to have their business, their family life and their social life all within the Inland Empire.”

Ann Romero decided she didn’t have to drive long distances to have a good life--and she may be the future of the Inland Empire.

For years, she commuted 68 miles from her Moreno Valley home to an office-supplies company in Costa Mesa. That meant nearly four hours in the car each day. When she and her husband decided to have a baby several years ago, they made some tough decisions.

She quit her job, taking local, part-time work and lowering her income, initially, by two-thirds. She became a voracious coupon clipper, and quit shopping at the mall in favor of discount retail stores. She and her husband eat at home more often--they joke that they will have bean soup for dinner to save a buck.

Then, much to her surprise, Romero found that she could earn almost as much as she had in Costa Mesa working locally--overseeing inventory for a picture-frame manufacturer.

What’s more, Romero takes her son Justin, now 8, to Riverside Christian Day School each morning and even volunteers at his school.

“I think more and more people will think about doing this,” she said. “It wasn’t easy, but the rewards are phenomenal. We can make it work.”

*

Times researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this report.