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At Home in the Inland Empire
I’ve lived and worked in Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario and Upland for the past 33 years, and think I know the Inland Empire boundaries, but when a recent caller pinned me down, I turned to Wikipedia, the online equivalent of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica rolled into one, for confirmation.
To quote Wikipedia, “The Inland Empire is a region mainly located in the Riverside and San Bernardino counties of Southern California and generally encompasses the urbanized, western Bernardino, and Riverside. … The most accepted physical boundaries between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire from west to east are the San Jose Hills splitting the San Gabriel Valley from the Pomona Valley, leading to the urban populations centered in the San Bernardino Valley. Cities in southeastern Los Angeles County lying east of the hills, such as Pomona, Diamond Bar, La Verne, and Claremont, are often included because of their location in the Pomona Valley and proximity to the Riverside/San Bernardino county line.”
So how come the newspaper that covers the western section of the area calls itself the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin?
The answer lies in historic civic and newspaper competition between the eastern and western portions of the region.
The San Bernardino Sun introduced the term “Inland Empire” in the 1950s, when returning servicemen and their families propelled the sleepy agricultural, semi-desert region east of Los Angeles into a urban/suburban beehive of activity. Construction of the interstate highway system trimmed travel time. The Ontario International Airport created an option for travelers when LAX was fogged in. Rail service through the region connects the ports of Los Angeles to the rest of the nation. Housing developments replaced citrus orchards throughout the region.
The term “Inland Empire” was disdained by the cities and newspapers of Ontario and Pomona. Largely, I suspect, because it was someone else’s idea. As a new copy editor at the Ontario Daily Report in the late 1970s, I quickly learned the “Inland Empire” was verboten and the approved term for the local region was the “Inland Valley,” identifying the newspaper’s distribution area in western San Bernardino County.
Civic pride and newspaper distribution aside, “Inland Valley” now seems to encompass too many valleys. The Daily Report has merged with the Pomona Progress-Bulletin, which had covered the Pomona Valley. San Gabriel Valley is “inland” too. Locally, there’s the Pomona Valley, San Bernardino Valley and Chino Valley. In television reports, weathercasters separate Southern California into coastal areas, downtown Los Angeles, “inland valleys” for that vast region north and east between Los Angeles, and desert areas.
I like “Inland Empire.” It describes a region that is at once urban and small town. Motorists driving through must watch the signs to know where one city ends and the next begins. There is no natural barrier between the western part of San Bernardino County and the city of San Bernardino. The vast land grants of the early ranchos gave way to citrus orchards and the orchards gave way to housing tracts and business parks.
It’s a huge area, containing 4 million people, according to Wikipedia – and that figure is probably based on the 2000 Census, before the construction of thousands of new homes in the region. Many millions more people are expected to move into the area in the next few years.
Government statisticians lump us with San Bernardino/Riverside region in terms of industrial development, employment, housing, population. The region is the 14th largest metropolitan area in the United States and still growing. The city of Rancho Cucamonga alone has 69 shopping centers, ranging from strip malls to the massive Victoria Gardens.
Right now, the region has some problems - including declining home prices and unemployment (especially in construction). Home prices inflated by sub-prime loans and the collapse of that greed-driven bubble are falling back within range of the average resident. A few years ago, only 18 percent of Inland Empire residents could afford to buy a home. Now that figure is 52 percent, according to John Husing, who has been studying and writing about the Inland Empire for many years. He notes the Inland Empire has room to accommodate expansion of both business and residential neighborhoods as Orange and Los Angeles counties get squeezed by growth.
- Ila
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