Inland Empire

If you stand along California 60 east of Riverside on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you can see them coming--armies of young families, in compact cars and pickup trucks, searching for a house they can afford to buy in Southern California's newest boom area--the "Inland Empire." As far as the eye can see, on both sides of the freeway, there are new homes or houses under construction. Real estate banners fly over the housing tracts--one is called "Dream Street," another "Hometown, U.S.A."

Terry Doebler woke up choking from the smoke. Doebler, 80, and her 82-year-old husband, Paul - retired New York transplants living in the Camarillo Springs neighborhood of Ventura County - had seen brushfires before in their 15 years there, but this was the first time a blaze forced them to evacuate. "I opened the front door and the whole mountain was on fire," Paul Doebler said. The Doeblers were among hundreds of residents in several Ventura County communities who fled their homes Thursday to escape a fast-moving brush fire that burned 8,000 acres and threatened thousands of homes.

Sixty miles northeast of the sleek corporate campuses of Google Inc. and Intel Corp., housing tracts sit vacant. Factories are closed and job centers are packed with people looking for work. Think Southern California's Inland Empire is suffering? By some measures, the inland region east of San Francisco has it just as bad. Like Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the inland area that includes San Joaquin, Alameda and Contra Costa counties became bedroom communities for workers priced out of real estate markets closer to the coast.

Nestled on the windy plains at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, once austere stretches of agricultural land have morphed into the country's most desirable industrial real estate market, and it is growing faster than any other industrial region in the U.S. Among the many merchants running large-scale operations now are such household names as Amazon.com Inc., Kohl's Corp., Skechers USA Inc., Mattel Inc. and Stater Bros. Markets. They come for vast warehouses - some are bigger than 30 football fields under one roof - where they can store, process and ship merchandise such as clothes, books and toys to ever more online shoppers and handle the rising flood of goods passing through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are bringing in a surprising new commodity: jobs. The first post-recession surge in employment at the nation's busiest seaport complex began this month and appears to be gathering momentum. There has been as much as a threefold increase in the number of longshoremen finding work on the docks in the first three weeks of February compared with the same period last year, a review of daily employment dispatches shows. Through the first three weeks there was an average of 2,679 longshore jobs a day during the usual three work shifts at the two ports, according to the summaries.

Bill Sepe has gotten used to rejection. The 28-year-old Rancho Cucamonga native has put in nearly 200 unsuccessful offers since August on Inland Empire homes, varying from typical suburban ranches to classic craftsman homes. All this anguish comes in pursuit of a modest home in the exurb of San Bernardino County, the epicenter of the Southern California housing crash. Plummeting values here sparked a vicious wave of foreclosures. But it's precisely because prices fell so far here that Sepe can't buy a house now. In a sharp irony, many would-be homeowners in hard-hit markets can't compete with a flood of all-cash offers from investors, some backed by Wall Street war chests.

Once home to one of the nation's largest concentrations of dairy farms, the Inland Empire's $500-million dairy industry is rapidly evaporating as dozens of farmers sell out to real estate developers. In the last two years, more than 160 dairies -- nearly 80% of those operating just a year ago -- have either been sold or are in escrow, according to the Milk Producers Council, a trade association based in Chino. The industry could be virtually gone within five years.

With sprawling new housing tracts transforming the Inland Empire earlier this decade, word traveled to immigrants across the state. There were jobs -- lots of jobs. Mexican native Ramon Granados got the news in the Northern California town of Watsonville. He moved to Riverside in 2004 and quickly was hired as an electrician. "There was tons of work -- new apartments, new construction," said Granados, 25, a U.S. citizen. "Everybody wanted to come to this part of California."

Nestled on the windy plains at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, once austere stretches of agricultural land have morphed into the country's most desirable industrial real estate market, and it is growing faster than any other industrial region in the U.S. Among the many merchants running large-scale operations now are such household names as Amazon.com Inc., Kohl's Corp., Skechers USA Inc., Mattel Inc. and Stater Bros. Markets. They come for vast warehouses - some are bigger than 30 football fields under one roof - where they can store, process and ship merchandise such as clothes, books and toys to ever more online shoppers and handle the rising flood of goods passing through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

The origins of the term "Inland Empire" are obscure. Longtime residents say they have heard the phrase for many years but do not know where it came from. In a 1977 paper, Ronald O. Loveridge, a University of California, Riverside, political scientist, said the first frequent use of "Inland Empire" was in an advertising campaign by a Riverside bank in the 1950s. Today the term is widely used.

Inland Empire officials seeking control of LA/Ontario International Airport are balking at an unprecedented demand by Los Angeles that they buy the struggling operation for hundreds of millions of dollars. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the agency that operates Ontario have insisted that the once-thriving aviation hub be sold at a price that helps recover the cost of improvements made over the years. Their studies estimate Ontario's fair market value at $243 million to $605 million.

Inland Empire officials seeking control of LA/Ontario International Airport are balking at an unprecedented demand by Los Angeles that they buy the struggling operation for hundreds of millions of dollars. Join us at 9 a.m. as we discuss the debate on what an aiport - - at least the one in Ontario - - is worth with Times reporter Dan Weikel. Inland Empire officials assert the facility, 37 miles west of downtown Los Angeles, has a negative market value due to its severe decline during the recession and its uncertain future.

The Corona-Norco Unified School District was named as a finalist Thursday for the prestigious Broad Prize, which honors academic excellence by minority and low-income students in urban districts across the nation. The Riverside County district is one of four finalists for the prize to be announced in September. The winning district will receive $550,000 in college scholarships for seniors in the class of 2013. The other three will each receive $150,000 in scholarships. The other finalists are the San Diego Unified School District, Houston Independent School District and Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina.

Invitation Homes bought one of its first fixer-uppers in the San Fernando Valley just last May, a three-bedroom steps from a sought-after school in north Granada Hills. More than 200 homes later, the company's Dodger Blue "for rent" signs are a fixture in the Valley -- markers for a massive Wall Street wager on the housing recovery. Created last year by private equity titan Blackstone Group, Invitation Homes has spent about $3.5 billion buying 20,000 houses in nine U.S. markets, including Southern California.

SACRAMENTO - "There's no place to go but up," asserted Jim Brulte, whose mission is to save the California Republican Party. "We're on the way back. " Brulte told me that in 2000 at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. He was the state Senate minority leader then. And was he ever wrong! The California GOP did make a brief resurgence under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was never fully accepted or appreciated by party activists. But in recent years, it has been going down, down, down.

Bill Sepe has gotten used to rejection. The 28-year-old Rancho Cucamonga native has put in nearly 200 unsuccessful offers since August on Inland Empire homes, varying from typical suburban ranches to classic craftsman homes. All this anguish comes in pursuit of a modest home in the exurb of San Bernardino County, the epicenter of the Southern California housing crash. Plummeting values here sparked a vicious wave of foreclosures. But it's precisely because prices fell so far here that Sepe can't buy a house now. In a sharp irony, many would-be homeowners in hard-hit markets can't compete with a flood of all-cash offers from investors, some backed by Wall Street war chests.

A magnitude 4.5 earthquake centered on a little-known fault five miles southeast of San Bernardino shook much of the Inland Empire and parts of Los Angeles and Orange counties at 4:18 a.m. Wednesday, seismologists said. Neither damage nor injuries were reported in the temblor, the latest of several moderate quakes to occur in Southern California in the last week. Seismologist Lucy Jones of the U.S.

SACRAMENTO - Desperate to return to relevance, the battered California Republican Party is looking for salvation in a shrewd dealmaker and prolific fundraiser once known for advancing his party's interests in a Capitol dominated by Democrats. Jim Brulte, a former Senate and Assembly minority leader forced from the Legislature by term limits in 2004, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen state GOP leader at the party's convention here next month. His plans for a rebirth focus, at the moment, on shoring up the basics: the fundraising operation, get-out-the-vote apparatus, data analysis capabilities and recruitment efforts.

Unemployment rates fell in 290 metro areas throughout the country in December from a year earlier, with the biggest drop occurring in Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev., which was pummeled by the housing bust. That region's unadjusted jobless rate fell 3.3 percentage points since December 2011 to 10%, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among the 49 metro areas with a population of 1 million or more, the Inland Empire recorded the highest unemployment rate, at 10.9%.