If you’re looking for who owns Inland Empire warehouses, don’t go to the Inland Empire.
That’s the takeaway from a data analysis that found the vast majority of Inland warehouse owners aren’t from Riverside or San Bernardino counties.
Instead, owners are more likely to be in other parts of California or other states, according to Mike McCarthy, a Riverside environmental consultant and a member of Riverside Neighbors Opposing Warehouses who did the analysis.
“I think it’s clear that the money (from logistics) is being pulled out of our region and that we are not benefiting from this, at least not enough,” McCarthy said.
Not all agree with McCarthy.
The idea that it’s better to have local warehouse owners is “a pretty dense argument,” said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership.
“I think (the focus on local ownership) ignores history,” Granillo said. “It ignores availability of capital and the technical know-how to build and run complex facilities.”
With sleek-walled, million-square-foot warehouses stretching to the horizon — and more on the way — the logistics industry has come to define the Inland Empire.
Proximity to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, an abundance of flat, undeveloped land, easy access to rail lines and freeways and a largely blue-collar workforce made the region ground zero for a warehouse boom that went into overdrive with a spike in e-commerce fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today, logistics is a vital Inland employer in a region that lacks coastal California’s high-paying white-collar jobs. But critics, including environmental justice advocates, lament the traffic and air pollution linked to warehouse-bound diesel trucks and accuse the logistics industry of paying substandard wages and forcing workers to toil in unsafe conditions.
Last month, more than 60 Inland groups signed a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom urging him to declare a public health emergency and impose a moratorium on new Inland warehouses.
McCarthy, in partnership with the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College, has previously mapped out which Inland cities have the biggest logistics footprints.
That analysis, like the breakdown of who owns Inland warehouses, relied on publicly available property data from Riverside and San Bernardino counties’ assessors offices, said McCarthy, owner of Radical Research LLC.
McCarthy determined which warehouses are locally owned using the mailing addresses where the warehouses’ property tax bills are sent.
“I would say that we should have 40% or 50% (local) ownership,” McCarthy said. “We’re barely at 20%.”
According to the study, companies with Denver, Colorado addresses are the top owners of Inland warehouse space and control 118.7 million square feet. Newport Beach came in second with 107.2 million square feet, followed by Irvine with 69.3 million, Los Angeles with 68.6 million and Chicago with 61.4 million.
Of the top 15 Inland warehouse owners, the only local entry was Ontario, with 30.7 million square feet.
It’s hard to pinpoint who exactly owns warehouses, McCarthy said, because properties are tied to limited liability corporations or LLCs with opaque names. While LLCs have to publicly disclose some ownership information, it can be hard to connect a warehouse to a specific owner.
A number of warehouses linked to Denver include LLCs with “Prologis” in their name. Headquartered in San Francisco, Prologis, which has offices in Denver, bills itself on its website as “the leader in logistics real estate.”
In an email, Prologis spokesperson Jennifer Nelson said the company, which was founded in California 40 years ago, owns 199 buildings totaling 77 million square feet in the Inland Empire.
“Prologis makes significant investments in our communities, including job training, renewable energy infrastructure, road safety improvements and more,” Nelson said.
“Our employees live and work in the region,” she added. “So we have a strong interest in the future of the Inland Empire and all of Southern California. We have been a long-time industry leader in sustainability and have committed to reaching net zero in our emissions by 2040.”
The lack of local Inland warehouse ownership is concerning, McCarthy said.
“They don’t have our air-quality problems. They don’t have our traffic problems,” he said. “They don’t have to drive alongside the trucks. So why would they care if (warehouses are) being put in bad places or if they’re causing health effects?”
McCarthy added: “There would be some economic benefit from having these negative impacts if it was a local business. But when the money is just taken out of our area, then we get nothing. It feels like we’re getting short changed.”
McCarthy said he’d like to see economic incentives “so that companies that are building and owning these warehouses put some of their white-collar jobs here too.”
Public policy should also make warehouses smaller, McCarthy said, noting that locally owned warehouses tend to be on the smaller side.
Granillo said the Inland Empire is home to a number of companies, such as UPS and Kaiser Permanente, that are headquartered elsewhere.
“They all have skin in the Inland Empire game,” he said.
It takes a lot of money and special expertise to make long-term investments in Inland warehouses, Granillo said.
“You’re talking (about) $100 million projects being invested in the Inland Empire economy, paying laborers and carpenters to create the facilities and that is economic upside (and) investment into the region,” he said.
“So you have to find companies and people that are willing to make that type of investment and have the ability … to carry that out.”
Granillo added: “How (are people going to) get their food and clothing if we don’t have warehouses? And fundamentally that is the question that needs to be answered. I don’t hear that coming from (warehouse opponents).”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct errors in photo captions. Ownership of the warehouses pictured in Moreno Valley is traced to Prologis, a San Francisco-based industrial real estate firm.
