- [Announcer] Support of the Empire Warehouse series on KVCR-TV comes from the Creative Corps Inland SoCal, a collaboration between the California Arts Council, the Inland Empire Community Foundation, Arts Connection, Riverside Arts Council, and the California Desert Arts Council, putting visual and media artists to work in the region.

And, viewers like you.

Thank you.

[gentle music] ♪ - [Sofia] I am just taking a walk here in lovely Rialto, just admiring the lovely architecture we have here!

Uh?

It's giving very Roblox house meets Brutalism?

Very...utilitarian.

I would look at the mountains, but they're kind of blocked off by the warehouse.

Anyways, we're going to investigate, why do warehouses come to cities like...here?

And, what does that process look like when someone like Amazon wants to be our neighbor?

[intriguing music] ♪ (truck engines rumbling) - [Sofia] So, we almost got, like, a warehouse on every corner.

And, this is just a-?

Nothing here.

So, it probably will be a warehouse at one point.

Redlands, Highland, and San Bernardino used to be super concentrated with citrus.

And, it would just-- used to be so much.

[click!]

A lot of the old postcards that you see of this area, [click!]

you can just see, like, the orchards going [click!]

all the way up to the mountain.

And so, [click!]

it's very interesting to see how the landscape has changed.

And now, it's just cement, asphalt, and warehouses.

But I can't imagine, like, having to live right next to this.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ - [Sofia] We're going to have a conversation with Dr. Keil.

He's a professor at McKenna College.

His expertise is in economics and finance.

So, he's gonna help us kind of understand how warehouses fit within the economy, and its real impact.

(light digital sounds) - Hi!

- Hello!

So, one of the first things that I've heard from people discussing, you know, about warehouses are the economic benefits.

It's always like jobs, jobs.

They bring jobs.

Can you discuss certain trends that you've seen when it comes to employment and warehouses?

- To begin with, you would say, why do we have so much logistics here?

"The Economist" has referred to our region as the warehouse capital of the world.

And, why is that?

And, the reason is that 40% of imports into the United States comes through two ports.

The two ports are Los Angeles and Long Beach.

And so, that's an immense volume that comes through them, right?

In 2005, so 20 years ago, the logistics sector was actually quite small.

We're talking maybe the sixth or seventh largest sector in terms of employment.

And so, this entire development of logistics becoming what it is now, which is basically the second largest employment sector in the Inland Empire, that's everything that has happened over the last 20 years.

So, if you look at employment in the logistics industry, it really went up after the coronavirus recession until about February of 2022.

And then, it-- since then, it actually has gone down.

And, we believe that the logistics industry simply overestimated how long this boom was going to last.

And so, being worried about not being able to find workers later, they overhired.

And, as a result of that, they actually have laid off quite a few people since February 2022.

The warehouse industry, the logistics industry, let's face it, does not on average have very high paying jobs.

So, they are at the lower end of it, and that's in many ways, the criticism of the logistics industry.

Yes, it provides jobs, but these are low paying jobs and they don't create a lot of value added.

- Do you think there can be potential problems in having such a large industry centralized in a single area, especially with technology and automation advancing?

- Well?

So, I have a colleague at the University of Redlands, Johannes Munoz, and he specializes in figuring out for areas in the United States how much they will lose in terms of jobs due to automation.

And so, obviously for somebody who works in logistics, the percent of their tasks, their daily tasks that can be automated is much higher than it is for the two of us, right?

And, according to that, they project how much employment loss there will be due to automation.

And that, unfortunately for the Inland Empire, is pretty scary because if you think about it, think about logistics.

Think about trucks driving.

It's similar.

Many of the tasks that are low skilled in the logistics industry will be replaced by automation.

And so, that is a very scary part because then the question is, if the jobs and logistics are gone, what will the Inland Empire get?

[gentle piano/string music] ♪ ♪ - [Sofia] Coming to places like these, it really reminds me of when I would be a kid and I would go with my mom to visit my abuelita and stop at Union Station.

So, it really is evident that we really are surrounded by major arteries of transportation, whether it's the trains here, or even just Route 66, in general.

♪ In the 1800s, the Southern Pacific Railroad came to San Bernardino, and soon, San Bernardino became [click!]

the gateway to Southern California.

Decades after that, it's become a major contributor to the economy here in San Bernardino and the transportation of goods throughout the country.

So, now we know why warehouses and logistics centers find us so enticing, but I still want to know how does that process look like when they come in?

And, do they have to follow any rules when warehouses establish themselves in our communities?

♪ Today, I'm going to be talking to Andrea.

She's an advocate and a policy analyst for the People's Collective for Environmental Justice.

- We are now in a place in California, right?

Where we are passing laws at the state level demanding for electric trucks.

But, that would not have happened if 30, 40, 50 years ago, people that lived in front of the rail yards, people that lived in front of the warehouses in the Inland Empire, in L.A. and all across the U.S., weren't fighting for diesel to be out of their communities.

So, we are in a place now where there are policies that are forcing the industry to be accountable to the pollution that they're bringing in, and they have to invest in switching out the technology.

And, here in the Inland Empire and L.A., we have the first regulation of warehouses.

There's no other warehouse regulation in the whole country.

- Okay.

- One of the first ones was passed here.

And, it's gonna slowly force the warehouses to put up solar panels, to put up charging, to start electrifying so that the workers that are there and the people that live there don't have to be breathing in diesel.

- [Sofia] I mean, just driving the 10!

- [Andrea] Just driving the 10, you can hop on- - Yeah!

- the back of every truck and make it to the port of L.A. - Literally, I hate driving the 10 because it's just-- You're surrounded by semis.

- [Andrea] You're surrounded, and it's so dangerous for both you as a driver and the semi driver.

Like-?

- [Sofia] Yeah!

- We-?

And, that's the other part that I think is really important to talk about, right?

Truckers.

Like, are truckers that own a truck or maybe they own two or three.

They're starting their small business, right?

Or, maybe they drive for someone like Amazon or UPS, or whatever.

Those are dignified jobs.

They're actually doing-- They are doing the work.

Like, they're doing work that we absolutely need.

They're essential workers, right?

How dangerous is it for them to be driving through these little neighborhoods, right?

Where there's not even sidewalks that are built.

- [Sofia] Tight turns.

- [Andrea] Or lighting, or-?

That's putting a driver into danger, and it's also putting the families that live around there in danger.

They're not building enough of the other parts that we need.

It's so focused on the warehouses.

- Yeah.

- [Andrea] Right?

We really need policies that say, if you're gonna put a warehouse, fine.

Make sure it's clean.

But, make sure the trucking routes are not going close to homes and schools, make sure that there's a buffer, right?

Anecdotally, you can just tell when you go to these city meetings that a lot of the people that are there are people of color that are fighting against it.

It's not always the case.

- Yeah.

- But, many times it is people of color.

And, a couple of years ago, our organization did a study with some students at the University of Redlands, and these students basically tracked all the big warehouses in the community.

And then, they put some-- They tried to see where are the people of color, and there is a correlation.

Wherever there's the ZIP codes with highest people of color, you're gonna find more of the industrial areas, and where it's growing.

There are studies that show that, like, our ZIP codes here closest to the warehouses are the ones that shop the least from Amazon.

- Mm hm.

- Right?

While the people that shop the most from Amazon, that get a package every single day, get a shipment of packages every single day, they live the farthest from it.

You know?

- That's crazy.

- Yeah!

So, what are our communities being built for?

Because they should be being built for us, right?

For us to thrive, for us to have opportunity, for us to live long and healthy lives.

But if they're just being built so that we can support someone else's benefit, then that's not fair.

I mean, I think this is a very important industry.

We have the clothes on us, the food on us a lot because of this industry and the people that work this industry, and our communities that hold this industry.

- [Sofia] Mm hm.

- [Andrea] But, we can't-- It can't be at the cost of our health, right?

And, that's a thing that happens a lot with environmental justice communities, is that they're forced to choose between having, you know, these jobs, these opportunities with, you know, the air that they breathe.

So, the middle ground is these corporations have to be accountable for the pollution that they cause, they have to be accountable to the workers.

They need to raise their standards.

They need to raise wages; make it a safer place to work.

They need to invest in the best technology possible.

I mean, if Jeff Bezos can make it to the moon, he can make every single truck electric like, in a day.

In a day!

[upbeat string music] ♪ (ambient truck traffic sounds) ♪ (truck engine rumbling) - [Sofia] So, after everything I've learned, I do have an understanding of what makes the I.E.

attractive for warehouses, and I know that they're not going away anytime soon.

But, I'm glad that there is work being done to put policies to hold these warehouses accountable so that the communities here are respected.

[bold string music] ♪ ♪ ♪ [upbeat music] ♪ [music fades] - [Announcer] Support of the Empire Warehouse series on KVCR-TV comes from the Creative Corps Inland SoCal, a collaboration between the California Arts Council, the Inland Empire Community Foundation, Arts Connection, Riverside Arts Council, and the California Desert Arts Council, putting visual and media artists to work in the region.

And, viewers like you.

Thank you.