With few options in the county, many firms have looked to the Inland Empire, the region east of the county line that stretches to the Banning and Beaumont area just outside of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. “We are running out of land and a lot of new industrial facilities require a ton of space. So 1 million-square-foot warehouses are becoming more common in places like San Bernardino,” said Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the Lusk Center. However, after years of development, space in the closer Inland Empire communities is starting to fill up. At the time, there wasn’t much of an industrial space crunch and the bigger concern was revitalizing downtown into a vibrant community with more residents. Indeed, many industrial buildings have been converted into loft developments, helping to restore the city’s historic core. “The ordinance made the conversion of industrial space into residential much easier because some of the former requirements were relaxed and residential space carries a much higher premium, making it very attractive to developers,” Conway said. Now, even one developer who used the ordinance to convert industrial buildings into a residential development says that Los Angeles city should create a policy to protect industrial land. “It needs to be a balancing approach when we look at the benefits and burden of preserving industrial land,” said Mark Weinstein, whose company MJW Investments built downtown’s Santee Village lofts project at a former industrial site. “I think if it is a solely industrial area and the building is industrial that building should be preserved.” Conway said that as the city loses more manufacturing jobs – a city study shows that 28.5 percent of the city’s workforce does industrial work – it is in danger of “losing the middle class or the lower middle class.”
