The Last Warehouse

Drive east from Los Angeles and the orange groves give way to grey. Perris and Moreno Valley, two working-class cities in Riverside County, sit at the center of the Inland Empire, the logistics engine that moves much of what arrives at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Cheap land and a spot at the meeting of freeways turned the region into a shelf for the nation’s online orders. The warehouses came in rows, then in blocks, then up against the fences of existing homes.

The bargain was straightforward. A distribution center pays property tax, hires local workers and asks little of the schools. Unions such as the Laborers’ International count warehouse construction and operations among the few blue-collar ladders left in the county. Against that sits the diesel: the trucks idling at loading bays, the fine particulates, the asthma rates that community groups have spent a decade mapping. The Redford Conservancy at Pitzer College and Radical Research built a public tool, Warehouse CITY, that tallies the warehouse floor area stacked around any given block against the homes and schools beside it.

For years the tax base usually carried the vote. Lately residents have carried more of them.

Perris did not stop warehouses all at once. On November 19, 2025 the city council signaled it would begin regulating new distribution centers. On December 10, 2025 it passed a 45-day urgency moratorium, the municipal equivalent of pulling a handbrake. Then, on January 13, 2026, it extended that pause by roughly 10 months — out to about December 9, 2026.

The extension did more than buy time. Under the new rules, any warehouse larger than 50,000 square feet needs a discretionary conditional-use permit and a council vote, rather than a clerk’s signature. The change froze more than a dozen industrial proposals already in the pipeline. Developers who had banked on Perris as the region’s easy yes now face a hearing, a crowd and a ballot of five elected people.

Just north, Moreno Valley tried to follow and did not quite arrive. On February 4, 2026 its council took up a 45-day urgency warehouse moratorium of its own. A majority voted yes, 3–2. It still failed. Urgency ordinances in California need a 4/5 supermajority, and three votes was one short of the four the measure required.

The near-miss stings more here than it might elsewhere, because Moreno Valley is the city that gave the region the Highland Fairview “World Logistics Center” — one of the largest warehouse complexes ever approved in California. A majority of its council wanted the brake; the supermajority rule kept the city moving.

It is not an isolated experiment. Fontana, Chino, Colton, Pomona, Norco and Rialto have all reached for warehouse moratoria of one shape or another in recent years. The Inland Empire is arguing with itself, city by city, about how much of its ground it is willing to pave.

While the cities improvise, California has set a floor. AB 98, a 2024 law that took effect January 1, 2026, writes statewide standards for logistics warehouses where before there were none. Its most concrete demand is distance: a loading bay must sit at least 300 feet from the nearest home, school or other sensitive site on industrial-zoned land, and 500 feet elsewhere.

The law also constrains truck routes and directs state air-quality regulators to report on Inland Empire monitoring in 2028 and 2033. None of this is theoretical enforcement. In 2022, Attorney General Rob Bonta reached a model settlement with the City of Fontana over a warehouse near Slover and Oleander avenues: a $210,000 community fund, air filtration offered to as many as 1,750 homes, and a binding city ordinance governing how warehouses get built. Sacramento has shown it will litigate the point, and cities have watched.

None of this settles the argument. The residents are not wrong about the diesel, and the trades are not wrong about the paychecks. CCAEJ, a Riverside-based environmental-justice group, and allied residents have litigated warehouse projects under California’s environmental-review law and pushed councils toward the pauses now spreading across the county. Their case is the air their children breathe. The building trades’ case is the paycheck, in a region where the alternative to a warehouse job is often no job. Neither claim cancels the other, which is why the fight keeps landing back on the same five-member dais.

The pauses show a region that learned to say no faster than it learned to say yes. At a Perris council meeting on May 26, 2026, one member watched his colleagues turn down a housing project and said aloud what a lot of the Inland Empire is starting to feel.

The remark, from a Perris council member, names the harder problem. A city can freeze the thing it has too much of. Saying yes to the thing it lacks — housing for the workers those warehouses employ — is a separate act of nerve, and the muscle for it has atrophied. You can follow how the votes actually fall, meeting after meeting, through Hamlet’s archive of Perris and Moreno Valley sessions.

The groves are not coming back. The question the Inland Empire is now asking, out loud and in public, is what it wants to build in their place — and whether it can still build anything at all.