It’s a sunny spring morning in Riverside, and Jen Larratt-Smith is walking through a field of yellow and purple wildflowers behind the home she shares with her husband and two kids.
“It’s a place near and dear to us,” she said, recalling how her family used the space constantly during the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020. “I would do my ‘science class’ with my son out here. He’d get his mountain bike and we’d come out here, and he would have to draw pictures of flowers that he saw or animals that he saw, and he took pictures of wildlife tracks.”
But she’s worried it may not be an open space for long.
Formerly part of the March Air Force Base, this 360-acre expanse is still dotted with bunkers that were used to house munitions before the base was closed in the early 1990s, and the military handed over control of the land to a local joint-power authority.
It’s now surrounded on three sides by suburban homes and a megachurch; to the east sits Interstate 215. On this morning, cyclists fly along the dirt trails and dog walkers meander among the blooming flowers.
Soon, though, nearly the entire open space could be paved over and developed into a commercial park that could include more than 4 million square feet of warehouses — about the size of 69 football fields — used by companies like Amazon as a repository for goods from across the globe that millions have come to depend on.
If approved, the six new warehouses would join the roughly 4,000 other warehouses that have already been built in the Inland Empire, this region east of Los Angeles spanning both Riverside and San Bernardino counties. All told, those warehouses already cover more than 1 billion square feet of land, with an estimated 170 million additional square feet of planned or proposed warehouse construction in the pipeline, including this project.
For neighbors like Larratt-Smith, whose house overlooks this field, it’s enough.
“We’ve been here since my son was an infant, in 2011,” she said. “When I look out in my backyard, I look out on the fields and on the military bunkers that they’re planning to blast. So I’m right here on the edge.”
‘It really snuck up on us’
This region has long been known as a logistics hub — it’s close to the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports and for years had relatively cheap, open land to build on. But Larratt-Smith says the pace of construction over the past decade has been staggering.
“It really snuck up on us,” she said. “Over time, we looked around and we were surrounded.”
There’s a lot of support behind the proliferation of these giant industrial buildings — including from virtually every chamber of commerce in the Inland Empire and many labor unions. Most city councils and other local government agencies have been happy to welcome the developments, citing the influx of trucking and warehouse jobs they bring, and their proximity to the two largest ports in the country.
But the pace of growth is causing a backlash among some residents, community groups and environmental organizations. They argue that the warehouses have not brought an economic boom, but rather low-paying, sometimes dangerous and often seasonal jobs. And they say the trucks bringing goods to and from the warehouses around the clock are emitting dangerous chemicals that are making people here sick.
“With all these corporations coming in from outside, buying these warehouses, basically they’re exploiting our land,” said Larratt-Smith, who has created a group called R-NOW, or Riverside Neighbors Opposing Warehouses.
“We have to pay the price of the traffic and the air quality and aesthetics and quality of life, but we don’t really reap any of the benefits,” she said.
Some researchers agree. Susan Phillips, professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College in the nearby city of Claremont, has been studying the impact of warehouses for over two decades.
