Warehouses Are Headed for the Central Valley, Too

“The rents are there, the labor’s there,” James Breeze told me recently. He’s the head of industrial and logistics research for the real estate data firm CBRE. “The Central Valley is going to be the distribution hub for Northern California, Oregon and inland states for the foreseeable future.”

Fresno’s mayor, Lee Brand, said in an emailed statement that e-commerce distribution centers were a critical part of efforts to diversify the area’s economy as it struggles to “achieve the economic success enjoyed by its wealthier neighbors along the California coast.”

Warehouses, he said, bring opportunities for residents who don’t have college educations.

“Their next step could be buying a house or using education benefits offered by Amazon, for instance, to attend college,” he said. “Maybe it improves the lives of their children, allowing them to become the first in the family to earn a degree.”

But for residents and community organizers, the warehouses are harbingers of the same problems they say have followed them in the Inland Empire: Pollution and traffic that disproportionately hurt poor communities of color, promises of economic mobility without follow-through and thousands of physically demanding jobs that are at risk of being automated, even if they come with benefits.

And the pandemic has made it more difficult to push back against plans to allow that kind of development in neighborhoods that are already vulnerable.

“Cities across California are fighting for these,” said Grecia Elenes, a senior policy advocate with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, an advocacy organization based in Fresno that has opposed city plans to attract industrial development. “It’s to the point where no one’s benefiting except the company itself — all on the backs of low-income communities, and communities of color.”