More than 100 homes are being demolished in unincorporated areas of Bloomington, California, to make way for an Inland Empire warehouse. Developer Howard Industrial Partners is building a 213-acre warehouse project near homes and schools.
Robert Gautier/Los Angeles Times/TNS
LOS ANGELES — When Benjamin and Christine Granillo bought 2.25 acres in San Bernardino County 40 years ago, they built their home with their own hands and surrounded it with a lush grove of avocado, orange and lemon trees.
“We thought we'd live here our whole lives,” Christine Granillo, 77, said as she trimmed the tree on a recent afternoon.
But the unincorporated Bloomington area is rapidly transforming as developers turn the 10 Freeway and the surrounding area into a logistics corridor connecting goods shipped to Southern California ports with online shoppers across the country. An Orange County-based industrial real estate company is demolishing 117 homes and ranches outside Bloomington to create more than 2 million square feet of warehouse space. The project will serve as a new distribution center for storing and moving goods that consumers want delivered to their homes.
All of the Granillos' neighbors across the street have sold their homes to developers, many of which have already been bulldozed. The Granillos gave up on the sale and now stand looking out at the rubble outside their imposing front door. That rubble will soon be replaced by a 479,000-square-foot fulfillment center. Their street will see heavy truck traffic. The street next door will become a parking lot with space for hundreds of trucks and trailers.
Christine Granillo mourns the loss of her neighbors and views of the San Bernardino Mountains, but, she adds, “What can we do about it? There's really nothing we can do.”
In November 2022, San Bernardino County supervisors voted 4-0 to approve the Bloomington Business Park, a 213-acre industrial park expected to bring thousands of jobs to Bloomington, a city of 23,000 residents whose majority are Latino.
The deal came with trade-offs familiar to Inland Empire communities being asked to shoulder the burden of a distribution center essential to America's online shopping habits. An environmental impact report found that the development would have “significant and unavoidable” impacts on air quality. But it would bring jobs to a working-class community that needs them. Howard Industrial Partners also promised to spend millions on infrastructure improvements, including new roads with traffic lights and sidewalks, and a modern sewer system in a neighborhood that still relies on aging septic tanks.
And because the warehouse project is about 50 feet from Zimmerman Elementary School, the developer agreed to pay the Colton Unified School District $44.5 million in a land swap to build a state-of-the-art school nearby.
Gary Grossich, a member of the Bloomington City Advisory Board, recommended that supervisors support the development. He said surrounding cities such as Rialto and Fontana have been aggressive in developing warehouses and this is an opportunity for Bloomington to benefit from the burgeoning industry.
“The warehousing industry was booming,” he said, “and I and others saw that it was the only way to benefit the greater good: more sheriff's deputies, more public safety, more services to the community and ultimately breaking even.”
Mike Tunney, vice president of development for Howard Industrial Partners, said his company shares those goals. “Overcoming these challenges and opportunities is a fundamental tenet of our development philosophy,” Tunney said.
But the project has divided Bloomington, creating a sharp sense of winners and losers. Many who sold their homes say they're happy they got a good price and can move on, but many neighbors who stayed behind see a future of more concrete, more semi-trailers and a hollowing out of the community's rural culture.
Esmeralda Tavares, 23, a member of a group called Concerned Neighbors of Bloomington, described the shift from rural residential to industrial development as “a complete change in our culture and lifestyle.” Many Bloomington residents ride horses, and her family runs a botanical garden.
She questions why San Bernardino County relies on developers to provide communities with critical infrastructure like sidewalks and sewers.
“It's easier for them to move into a warehouse and say, 'Okay, let them take over your community,'” she says. “But now what kind of community is that going to be? They're kicking people out, so who's going to go to school right away? Who's going to live here?”
An agent affiliated with Howard Industrial Partners approached Raquel Diaz several years ago about selling her Bloomington-area home a mile south of the 10 Freeway, but the offer couldn't go through until the county approved the project.
She and her family bought the home for $140,000 in 2012. “We were so excited,” she said, because it was the first home for her family of five. But the three-bedroom house on Locust Street quickly became a nightmare.
Every time it rained, the house flooded and smelled of damp, and she and her husband worried about raising their young child in moldy conditions.
Their street had no sidewalks, but people still drove fast. Accidents were alarmingly common, she said. Her children were not allowed to check the mail box on the side of the road or throw out trash.
“We ended up buying a crappy house,” she said. “We were happy living in Bloomington, but it just didn't work out.”
By the time the county approved the warehouse development, home prices across Southern California were soaring. Diaz said the developer encouraged him to find a home he wanted to buy, even if it was more expensive than he'd originally negotiated, and to make sure it was on a hilltop, a cost the company would cover.
They chose a five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Highland, a suburb in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, and purchased the property in January 2023 for $1.05 million. The 3,800-square-foot home has a pool and views. It has a sewer system, and while the neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks, nearby streets have sidewalks and bike lanes.
“It still doesn't seem real that we've arrived,” she said. “It's such a beautiful place. I absolutely love where I live.”
Diaz said she has heard other residents say homeowners were harassed and pressured to sell, something she swears isn't true.
“Nobody is trying to get rid of me,” she said. “I was lucky to have the opportunity to start afresh.”
Carolina Rios also saw an opportunity in the developer's offer.
Rios and her family bought their Bloomington home for $225,000 and lived there for about 13 years. She has fond memories of the three-bedroom house on Laurel Street, where she hosted her daughter's 15th birthday party and was married to her husband in the gardens.
But the house was old, and instead of storm drains, the houses on her street had drainage pipes under their driveways that ran into gutters. Every time it rained, the street flooded. To get across the yards, she had to walk on pallets or bricks.
“The ditch across the street was full of water and mosquitoes and raccoons and snakes and all the fun wildlife you'd want to go to the zoo to see, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” she said, “but not in my house, around my kids.”
She agreed to the sale in 2016. After the county approved the project, acknowledging rising home prices, she said, the developer adjusted the purchase price to $1.4 million in 2023. In late December, she closed on a new construction home in Riverside with one bedroom, a pool and an enclosed patio. She paid $1.2 million in cash.
She knows some people oppose the warehouse development, but she says the industry provides good jobs: Her oldest sons, ages 27 and 24, both work at the FedEx warehouse in Bloomington, where they say they have flexible hours and frequent raises.
While some homeowners seized the opportunity to move out of Bloomington, Felipe and Blanca Ortiz were surprised when their landlord agreed to sell the ranch-style home they were renting.
The Ortiz family and their four children have lived on their two-acre property for over a decade. They continue the family traditions of their home in Morelos, Mexico, by raising horses, goats, and chickens on their small plot.
They loved to ride their horses through the hills behind their home and regularly traveled to other cities to ride in parades, dressed in traditional Mexican cowboy and cowgirl costumes. They organized one 100-horse parade to raise money for neighbors in need.
“It's their life,” Felipe Ortiz said, sharing a video on TikTok of the kids performing on horseback.
In February, the family received a notice informing them that their lease was ending in 60 days. It came from a company connected to Timothy Howard of Howard Industrial Partners, and was the only proof the family had that their rental home had been sold.
That same day, the Ortiz family's security camera footage showed an excavator knocking down a chain-link gate in front of the ranch. The Ortiz family's two youngest children, ages 6 and 12, were home at the time, and the family viewed this as an attempt to intimidate.
Tunney, of Howard Industrial Partners, said it was “disappointing” that the previous owners did not inform the Ortiz family about the sale.
“Furthermore, we were not informed that anyone was living on the property,” Tunney said. “The excavator accident was the result of carelessness on the part of the operator, who had mistaken the address as he was due to work at a nearby site.”
Months later, the family continues to live in the house while they await eviction proceedings. Ortiz said she is struggling to find another home that will accommodate her family of six and their eight horses. As the search drags on, she said her children are traumatized. Her youngest child comes home from school every day worried that their house has been demolished.
“Every day, a machine passes by here and destroys the house behind us,” Ortiz said, “and we're left with the fear that the machine will come and destroy our house.”
As demolition gets underway, a coalition of environmental groups has filed a lawsuit against San Bernardino County and Howard Industrial Partners to try to halt the project, alleging it violates state environmental and Fair Housing laws, and asking for the county's approval to be vacated and a more “meaningful” review.
Adrian Martinez, deputy chief attorney at Earthjustice, the group representing the plaintiffs, called the plaintiffs' efforts a landmark moment in “the fight against the freight industry and its disregard for public health.”
“There are people who don't want warehouses in their neighborhoods and just want peace,” Martinez said. “I think this is a tipping point in the misconception that you have to pack thousands of trucks and pollute the air in order to give resources to your community. Nowhere is this story more persistent than in the Inland Empire, and nowhere is this story more persistent than in Bloomington.”
A hearing is scheduled for later this month in San Bernardino County Superior Court.
Meanwhile, just a few miles away, residents in southeast Bloomington are starting to hear from developers interested in building more warehouses in their area.
Daniella Vargas, 24, said her parents bought the house here more than 20 years ago — both Mexican immigrants — and it's a great source of pride for them to own a home that will be passed down to their four children.
Vargas' family raises chickens on their land, but the area is filled with industry: A short drive from the family's home is another group of warehouses, a railroad and the 10 Freeway.
Recently, they've received calls and “weird mail” from real estate developers wanting to buy their homes, Vargas said. “It's like a check that says, 'Here's X amount of money, call us to make it happen.'
She said her family doesn't want to leave, but it feels inevitable that their neighborhood will be next.
“Everyone who's moving out of Bloomington is doing it for the right reasons,” Vargas said. “My family is really proud. But if they build a warehouse here and the decision is made for us to leave, we can't stay here with all the pollution, all the traffic, no neighbors, no neighborhood amenities.”
