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."

The third-graders struggled to keep pace. And their teachers at Parkridge Elementary School in Corona wanted to know why. The teachers met after school recently and delved into sheets of data and reading comprehension test questions. They quickly found the reason: Their students could predict events in a story but only a third of them could infer how an incident would affect the story's outcome. The five teachers developed plans to aggressively target the lackluster skill.

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.

MINNEAPOLIS — This is not, as ballplayers like to say, Jerome Williams' first rodeo. The 30-year-old right-hander is in his 15th professional season, has spent nearly four years in the big leagues, started a playoff game and has pitched in Mexico, Venezuela and Taiwan. But even Williams had to admit that it will be a considerable jump going from a rehabilitation start for Class-A Inland Empire on Tuesday night to pitching Sunday night against the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium in a game that will be nationally televised.

The Inland Empire has become a new battleground for unions looking to organize warehouse workers and broaden labor's clout in international trade, a $300-billion industry in the Southland. The fledgling movement is backed by a coalition of unions with more than 6 million members known as Change to Win.

As the regional economy continues to sputter, vacancy rates are beginning to climb at warehouses and distribution centers for industrial goods, putting the already hard-hit Inland Empire at further risk of decline and threatening facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties as well. After years of high occupancy and rapid construction of cargo hubs, immense spaces are now standing empty.

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.

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."

Three Riverside County businessmen and four associates were criminally charged Thursday after prosecutors said they sold false investments and committed grand theft in a scheme that bilked clients of $17 million and left many broke. "The schemes . . . collected tens of millions of dollars and victimized both individual investors and financial institutions," U.S. Atty. George S. Cardona said at a news conference in Riverside. "Using storefronts across the Inland Empire and numerous phone lines assigned to their shell companies, the schemers misled banks into believing that prospective borrowers had significant assets, when in fact the schemers were engaging in a mortgage fraud shell game built on lies to both their investors and the banks."

In the run-up to what became one of the worst storm systems to hit Southern California in five years, all the concern was focused on the Los Angeles foothill communities scarred by the Station fire. But when the wildest weather arrived Wednesday, the worst-hit areas were not La Cañada Flintridge or La Crescenta in the San Gabriel Mountains. Instead, by the luck of the draw, the heart of the storm plunged straight into Orange County and the Inland Empire, giving those areas a soaking that residents said was the worst in recent memory.

For the first time in 20 years, a Republican running for Congress in Riverside needs help. John Tavaglione huddled with supporters in the mirrored back room of a local Coco's on a recent rainy evening, laying out a ground game for his first crack at federal office. As a Republican and political heir of a powerful Riverside family, the longtime county supervisor would have breezed into Washington, D.C., in past elections. The Inland Empire was heralded as California's new conservative frontier — the "new Orange County" — just 10 years ago. But political districts have been remade.

A business park in Chino is a long way removed from an Iowa cornfield, but the owners of I & I Brewing can't help but compare their early success to a 1989 baseball movie. People have called Chuck Foster saying they cannot find his 2-month old brewery, and it's not hard to see why. Like many a maker of craft beer, his I & I Brewing (14175 Telephone Ave. Unit J, Chino; iandibrewing.blogspot.com) sits in a nondescript manufacturing and commercial district, one in which I & I's Unit J looks identical to, say, Unit B. Yet with zero advertising, and only enough beer to be open two days per week, Foster, a full-time field service engineer by day, can barely meet demand.

A clear majority of likely voters in Los Angeles favor transferring control of struggling LA/Ontario International Airport from the city to a municipality in the Inland Empire, a new public opinion survey shows. The poll, which is part of a political strategy by the city of Ontario to wrest ownership of the facility from Los Angeles World Airports, is largely directed at Los Angeles City Council members and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who have resisted the idea in the past.

A federal plan to preserve more than 9,000 acres of river habitat so that the threatened Santa Ana sucker fish can fulfill its complex life cycle has run into stiff resistance from critics who say it jeopardizes development and water supplies in the Inland Empire. Two cities and 10 water districts have sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in U.S. District Court over the agency's decision to preserve the habitat. They say that it imposes restrictions on water conservation, groundwater recharge and flood control operations that affect water supplies for 1 million residents, and that it threatens plans to sell Santa Ana River water to thirsty communities elsewhere.

Because passenger traffic at L.A./Ontario International Airport is continuing to drop, officials began Thursday to explore closing one of the airport's two terminals. The idea comes as Ontario International finds itself among the fastest-declining midsize airports in the country. A pillar of pride for the Inland Empire, the sprawling facility — owned and operated by the city of Los Angeles — lost a third of its 7.2 million passengers during the economic downturn between 2007 and 2010.

Obama administration officials ventured to the Inland Empire on Saturday for a policy summit with Latinos, getting an earful from residents stung by the region's flattened economy and critical of Washington's failure to reform the nation's immigration system. The daylong meeting at UC Riverside, one of a series that have been held across the country, included free-flowing policy bull sessions and presentations by White House representatives touting President Obama's proposed jobs bills and record on healthcare, education funding and immigration.

Jim Lytle gunned his silver BMW past the boarded-up model homes and the faded red flags of an abandoned sales office, then steered into a grid of empty streets and yellowed grass. Millions of dollars were spent to turn farmland into housing tracts. Lots were graded, roads were paved, sewers installed. The houses? They will come, Lytle promises, right here on these acres and acres of weed-strewn fields. "This is a broken subdivision, which is obvious by looking at the ground," said Lytle, whose real estate investment firm has been snapping up land in Winchester and throughout Riverside County.

Brothers Jose and Daniel Roman from Riverside are big boxing fans, but until Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario was constructed last year, their options to watch a match were restricted to hotel ballrooms, casino parking lots or a lengthy drive to a pricey seat at Staples Center. "One hundred bucks on the floor here, I'm mingling with fighters," Jose Roman, 27, said. "There's a strong base of fans like me in this area who want this." The Romans aren't alone, and arena executives and boxing promoters have noticed, as evidenced by Saturday night's show headlined by heavyweight title contender Cris Arreola, which drew more than 6,000 fans to the 10,000-capacity facility.

It's the middle of the business day and the cavernous baggage claim area in Terminal 2 at L.A./Ontario International Airport is deserted. Upstairs, the food and beverage shops are closed. At the information desk, a volunteer quietly waits for travelers who never come. Out at the curb, Miguel Del Valle of Moreno Valley arrives for a flight to Colorado, looks at the empty terminal and asks an idle skycap if the place is closed. "No, no, no. Come on in," the skycap assures him, reaching for his luggage.