MORENO VALLEY — The largest bribe the FBI has ever paid to a public official in a sting operation wasn’t to a United States senator or even a state lawmaker. It was to a lowly city councilman in this gritty, unglamorous Los Angeles exurb, where a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line, and local headlines play a steady drumbeat of grim news such as the daytime murder of a grandmother at a gas station.
Former Moreno Valley City Councilman Marcelo Co.
AP Photo
Councilman Marcelo Co didn’t seem particularly interested in improving the town. Even as he ran for office in 2010, he faced criminal charges for renting out apartments that were slummy and unsafe. Midway through his first term, he was caught on tape taking $2.36 million in cash from an undercover agent he thought was a land developer. Co told the agent that for enough money he would vote “yes” on any land-use plans. “I don’t care if it’s the shittiest can of worms,” Co said.
Despite Moreno Valley’s depressed property values, control over its land is actually worth a fortune. Indeed, nearly every major retailer in the world covets the kind of real estate the city offers: empty acres near freeways and train tracks at the epicenter of one of the largest but least noticed land rushes in America.
This arid flatland, shimmering and indistinct in the heat and smog, is just perfect for warehouses. These are not, however, warehouses as most people think of them. These are massive, futuristic behemoths that have proliferated on a scale seen nowhere else on the continent to usher in goods from Asia to consumers across a vast swath of the United States.
Americans have grown to expect the goods they want delivered to their homes or nearby store shelves within days or hours. But all this two-day shipping, click-to-ship, and get-it-on-your-doorstep-by-noon-tomorrow has come at a price, paid by the people who live in the shadows of the mega-warehouses: lung-stunting, cancer-causing pollution and, in some cases, political corruption.
The underside of our consumer economy can be seen in a tale of two cities, just 20 miles apart. There is Moreno Valley, where developers have shoveled in money to win the political approvals to build new warehouses. And there is Mira Loma, a tiny community already awash in warehouses and suffering some of the worst pollution in America.
“Everyone wants a new flat-screen TV,” said Ed Avol, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine who has spent the last two decades studying the effects of air pollution on children. “Everyone wants new clothing. But nobody thinks about how it got [to them.]”
Warehouses line both sides of Etiwanda Avenue as it stretches out into the Inland Empire.
Photograph by Jesse Kaplan for BuzzFeed News / Via jessekaplanphoto.com
Moreno Valley and Mira Loma lie in the vast sprawl east of Los Angeles known as the Inland Empire. Three decades ago, the area was a bastion of orange groves, military bases, and light manufacturing. But in recent years, a number of Inland Empire cities, which even many Southern California residents couldn’t locate on a map, have quietly become pivotal to a transformation in the global economy.
Shipping containers at the port of Los Angeles.
Courtesy of the port of Los Angeles
More than 40% of all shipping containers imported to the United States enter through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Most of that cargo then moves through the Inland Empire. It either passes through or stops off at distribution centers serving Amazon, Wal-Mart Stores, Target, Costco, Home Depot, Restoration Hardware, Baskin-Robbins, Nike, Nordstrom, Kraft Foods, Toys ‘R’ Us, Ford, BMW... the list goes on and on.
If you live anywhere in the United States west of about Chicago, and you eat, wear, watch, play, sit on, or drive a product bought retail in recent years, chances are good that it came through this area.
And if you live in the Inland Empire, you’ve watched giant flat-roofed buildings that resemble alien spaceships march across the landscape with a speed some compare to a raging forest fire.
There is now enough industrial space in Riverside and San Bernardino counties — the two counties that make up the Inland Empire — to enclose almost half of Manhattan. Industry experts estimate that the area needs at least 15 million additional square feet every year just to keep pace with demand.
That, in and of itself, might not be so bad for the air. But getting the goods in and out of these warehouses requires trucks and trains. Thousands upon thousands of them, passing through in a ceaseless tide, creating a dull background roar, and contributing to some of the worst pollution in America.
Although air quality overall in Southern California has improved in the last two decades, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the area has had among the nation’s worst ozone pollution almost every single year since 1988 and the worst fine-particulate-matter pollution in Southern California since the agency began measurements in 1999.
The well-defined line between the residential neighborhood of Mira Loma (right) and the massive warehouse structures in the area (left).
Photograph by Emily Berl for BuzzFeed News
The community that epitomizes the pollution warehouses can bring is Mira Loma.
“Our quality of life is in the tubes,” said Gene Proctor, 73, who has lived in Mira Loma Village for 43 years. “I wish people shopping in Tucson, Arizona, in other places, I wish they could see the little kids around here, their respiratory problems.” His great-granddaughter has asthma, and his 3-year-old great-grandson, he said, “coughs like a smoker.”
Mira Loma Village, shown in green, is almost completely surrounded by warehouses.
Population 21,000, Mira Loma is so small and poor it doesn’t have a movie theater, a community center, or even a moderately upscale restaurant. What it does have are 90 warehouses and a whole lot of big rigs: Trucks rumble through 15,000 times every day . In just half an hour on a recent afternoon, 269 trucks passed by the big plate glass window in the front of the Farmer Boys truck stop on Etiwanda Avenue.
That is more than one every seven seconds.
Avol, the professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, began visiting the town in the early 1990s as part of a study of air pollution and children’s health across Southern California. Back then, he said, researchers chose Mira Loma because it sits at the “end of the tailpipe” of the Los Angeles basin, meaning the prevailing winds off the Pacific Ocean blow L.A.’s infamous smog east until much of it arrives in Mira Loma. So it was rural yet had a lot of ozone and smog. Other places in the study, such as Santa Barbara and Long Beach, were picked because they were thought to boast clean air or because they were in industrial areas.
When the study began, Mira Loma residents complained to researchers about the smell of dairy cows, herds of which clustered on vast pastures and cow yards. But in 1987, Riverside county supervisors revamped the general plan for Mira Loma, clearing the way for massive warehouse development.
“In the course of a few years, the dairies disappeared,” and what had been “open pasture became streets and warehouses, lined with trucks,” Avol said. “Mira Loma turned out to be a very interesting place to study.”
The trucks made the already bad air worse, bringing in diesel particulates, very small particles that can enter the lungs and travel to tissues throughout the body. They are associated with asthma, heart disease, neurological problems, and cancer.
In Mira Loma, children were found to be growing up with stunted lungs compared with children living in places with better air. Their lungs were growing at a rate that was 1 to 1.5% slower, Avol said, so that “after their teen years, they were about 10 to 12% lower in lung function than children who had grown up in cleaner places.”
He added: “We have no information at this point that supports the idea that they ever catch up.”
Studies from other Inland Empire communities are also dire. In a neighborhood near the BNSF rail yard in the city of San Bernardino, Loma Linda University researchers found that adults have more respiratory problems, and children alarmingly high rates of asthma, even when compared with other polluted communities.
Warehouse industry officials, along with Barry Wallerstein, the head of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, insist that it is possible to build jumbo warehouses that do not pose a threat to public health. The key, Wallerstein said, is taking steps such as requiring that “clean” trucks service them and ensuring that traffic going in and out does not abut residential areas.
And yet, time and again, records and interviews show, officials failed to consider health impacts when approving warehouses.
A 2002 investigation by the Riverside Press Enterprise, the local paper, examined the dozens of warehouses approved to be built in Mira Loma between 1987 and 2000. County planners couldn’t point to a single one in which they had required a detailed environmental study.
A spokesman for the county said it has “improved environmental protection,” and indeed as lawsuits from environmentalists and disconcerting health studies have piled up, officials across the Inland Empire have been ordering environmental reviews. But that doesn’t mean they turn down developers’ requests for more warehouses.
In 2011, Riverside County officials voted to allow a 1-million-plus-square-foot complex on one of the last pieces of vacant land near Mira Loma Village despite a study that found it would pose health risks to the people living there.
A local environmental group, the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, sued. California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined the suit on the side of environmentalists.
The two sides reached a settlement last year that allowed development to proceed but required local officials and the developer to make the project "greener," with electric vehicle charging stations and even a potential prohibition on trucks on the road closest to the village.
The settlement also contained a provision that feels ripped from the pages of dystopian fiction: Every home in the village would be offered high-tech air filters so residents could avoid breathing the polluted air right outside their windows.
Lillyana Carrasco is pictured here with her father, Daniel Carrasco, as she leans on a new air filter at their family's home in Mira Loma, California, on July 12. She was not part of the study that found stunted lungs.
Photograph by Emily Berl for BuzzFeed News
The warehouse boom has been propelled by two stark factors: poverty and money.
Many of the cities in the Inland Empire, battered particularly badly by the foreclosure crisis, face bleak economic prospects. Just one-fifth of adults over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree. When people are desperate for jobs, thousands of trucks driving through their community every day seems more tolerable.
Then there is the money: Warehouse developers and the retailers that buy or lease from them have it. When they come in, they bring tax revenues to cash-starved local governments.
And developers donate to the political campaigns of politicians who control land-use approvals. Unlike the bribe Councilman Co took, much if not most of the money surely flows through legal channels in the form of campaign contributions. But it’s hard to find an elected official in the Inland Empire who hasn’t benefited significantly, and in some cases overwhelmingly, from development interests.
That was certainly the case in Moreno Valley. Population 200,000, the exurb sits 65 miles from Los Angeles. At the eastern edge of town, houses peter out into a dusty brown expanse, stretching to the horizon.
The flat land, right by a freeway, is the site of developer Iddo Beneevi’s audacious plan to build what may well be the nation’s largest warehouse complex, a 41-million-square-foot colossus equivalent to 700 football fields called The World Logistics Center.
Long before the undercover FBI operative bribed Councilman Co (and then arrested him), Benzeevi methodically bought land — the city estimates he owns or controls about half the developable land in town — and helped build a political machine in this city.
Benzeevi, as he will tell just about anyone who asks and even some who don’t, believes that “the logistics industry” is the inevitable next step in the evolution of human economic development, the end of a line of progress that leads from agrarian society to the great colonial empires to Apple, which, he claimed, can be seen as just a really cool logistics company.
So far, he acknowledged, Moreno Valley has not been a hotbed of economic innovation. But with his help, he insisted, the city can put itself at the center of world commerce.
Benzeevi has an exquisitely courteous manner, even with those who disagree with him, and a fancier style of dress — suits or pressed shirts — than that favored by most who frequent Moreno Valley City Hall. His long-winded fervor on the benefits of the logistics economy is so well known it is something of a joke in town.
But until fairly recently his focus, like that of so many other developers, was on high-end homes that would rise up from the dry scrub as they had in so many other Inland Empire communities before the housing crash.
In 2005, Benzeevi, reportedly working with Florida-based developer Jules Trump (no relation to the Donald), won approvals for “Aquabella,” an upscale community that would feature estates built around artificial lakes — “real resort living, without the hotel,” Benzeevi told one publication.
He even helped convince the Moreno Valley City Council to rename the part of the city that would include the Aquabella community to “Rancho Belago” — the fact that “Belago” is not a word in English, Spanish, Italian, or any other common language didn’t deter anyone, nor did one resident’s complaint that it sounded “goofy” and “like a casino from Las Vegas.”
Rancho Belago signs were eventually put up all over the eastern end of town — although they were modified slightly from the original design after the city of Beverly Hills complained that they looked an awful lot like their iconic town signs. They still look very similar.
Macey Foronda/BuzzFeed (Rancho Belago), Flickr: Thom Watson/Creative Commons / Via Flickr: thomwatson
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