A Just Transition For Southern California

For more than 30 years, the warehouse/logistics industry has dramatically expanded across four counties in the greater LA area (175 million square feet per decade), bringing prosperity to a few, but at an enormous cost for millions more, in terms of health, poverty, quality of life and environmental damage. Yet that damage has never been comprehensively assessed, until now.  Finally, with a new, data-rich report from the Economic Roundtable, “Exhausting Our Air: Environmental and Human Costs of Diesel Trucks,” in partnership with People’s Collective for Environmental Justice (PC4EJ) and the Sierra Club, we have that long-overdue assessment.

“The reason why it hasn’t been done before may be that the problem seemed insoluble. There wasn’t a feasible alternative to diesel-powered trucks,” lead author Dan Flaming told Random Lengths. “The cost has been years of growing environmental injustice, growing health problems among households living near warehouses, and growing uncompensated public costs for damage to roads and bridges.

“The reason for doing the study now is that there is a government mandate to eliminate diesel-powered trucks from port drayage. However as we saw with the clean trucks program at the ports some years ago, these mandates are fragile,” Flaming said. “The infrastructure to support the transition has to match the pace of the transition, otherwise it will get derailed.”

While the overall focus is on the unequal costs and what to do about it, the report drills deep down into multiple facets of what this entails, with chapters on warehouse expansion, truck drivers and trucking companies, impacts of warehouse trucking, worker and jobs, impacts of warehouses on frontline families, respiratory distress, and onsite warehouse emissions. It includes 73 figures visually presenting the detailed data for easy comprehension, along with related community profiles by the PC4EJ that provide ground-level perspectives. These include a truck driver and retiree, a trucking company owner, a Teamster, an Amazon Air worker, an indigenous and Mexican elder, and an environmental advocate, George Hauge.

Warehouses and their workers are located in lower-income communities, while consumers that benefit most from are “higher-income communities, far removed from the noise and emissions caused by diesel trucks and warehouses,” the report notes. Both are shown in maps, broken down to the census tract level.

Over 2.1 million residents live within 2,000 feet of large warehouses. Their median income is 18% lower than in the rest of the four-county region, the poverty rate is 22% higher and housing overcrowding is 38% higher. They’re also 10% more likely to have children, 23% more likely to be headed by a woman, and 40% more likely to be Latino than in the overall region. And for frontline warehouse workers specifically, the average wage in 2022 was $18.95 an hour — less than half a living wage. And it’s getting worse. Their wages “decreased an average of $13 dollars each year from 2001 to 2022, when adjusted for inflation.”

But for some, it’s even worse. Just over 730,000 residents live within 1,000 feet of large warehouses and almost 110,000 live within 300 feet of them.

“The warehouse industry pays bottom-feeder wages to warehouse workers who assemble, package, and send out goods that often have high value to consumers throughout Southern California who are preponderantly affluent,” the report sums up. “This is an uncompensated transfer of wealth from under-paid workers to corporate warehouses and affluent consumers.”

The region has over 3,300 large warehouses with 100,000 square feet or more, with the largest number in LA County, but San Bernardino County has the most with 500,000 square feet or more, which is reflected in the fact that its health effect costs are double those of LA County, whose costs barely exceed Riverside County. These costs include premature death, infant mortality, nonfatal heart attacks and other cardiovascular impacts, respiratory impacts — hospital admits, acute bronchitis, upper and lower respiratory symptoms, asthma exacerbation and ER—minor restricted activity days, and work loss days.

Ontario, in San Bernardino County, with 289 warehouses covering 81,755,360 square feet, is the single most impacted city, compared to the City of Industry in LA County with 197 warehouses covering 48,803,707 square feet. In Riverside County, once-rural Moreno Valley is most impacted, with 48 warehouses covering 26,635,719 square feet. The average warehouse there is just shy of 555,000 square feet, more than double the size in the City of Industry.

For George Hauge, fighting this reckless expansion “became the normal, voluntary way” he spends his days, his community profile explains. “To this day George’s schedule involves litigation calls four to five times a week.” It’s often a direct result of governmental failure. “George says that in some cases developers are willing to improve their plans, but the planning commission and planning staff aren’t requiring anything at all. Then, mitigation of adverse impacts is eventually added after litigation.”

In fact, “Large warehouses are often constructed on land that was previously zoned for housing or agriculture, especially in Inland Empire communities,” the report notes. “In Riverside County, six percent of large warehouses are zoned residential and two percent agricultural, indicating that zoning changes after land uses materialize, rather than providing a framework for authorizing land uses.”

This is exactly what happened with the multi-million Skechers warehouse approved in 2008, Hauge’s profile recalls. “The school district had already purchased the site and had been approved by the city for a new High School, but the school was not built to make room for the warehouse project. They never found another site for the high school.” It’s another example of a public cost — one that’s difficult to calculate, but deeply felt.

“We are up against pollution, traffic impacts, truck lanes, and low-paying warehouse jobs,” Hague says. “Open space that should be set aside is being consumed for job-producing lands that produce very few jobs per square foot. Now with automation and robotics, there will be less jobs per square foot than there are now.”

While those closest to warehouses bear the heaviest burden, the report notes that California as a whole suffers $1.07 billion in overall uncompensated public costs, including:

• $402 million in injuries, fatalities and property damage from accidents.
• $247 million from wear and tear on roads and bridges.
• $178 million in harmful effects from exhaust emissions of particulate matter and nitrogen oxides.
• $170 million in delays caused by traffic congestion.
• $57 million in climate impacts from CO2 greenhouse gas emissions.
• $13 million in loss of value caused by truck-related noise for adjacent properties.

Much, but not all, of such costs can be sharply reduced by the shift to electrification. But as Flaming said, the challenge is in doing it right. The report’s first three recommendations are:

• Equitably assess the full environmental and economic impacts of warehouses before approving any new warehouse construction or the expansion of air cargo facilities. 
• Fully enforce noise regulations for all warehouses. 
• Establish a living minimum wage for warehouse workers.

Then comes protecting the truck electrification timeline created by two recent regulatory actions, both of which are being challenged by the trucking industry: The Advanced Clean Fleets Regulation passed by the California Air Resource Board in April 2023, and the Warehouse Indirect Source Rule, passed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District in May 2021.

And three anticipatory actions to ensure equitable, effective electrification:

• Proactively upgrade the electrical networks serving trucking companies and warehouses to ensure that electricity is available to recharge trucks as soon as it is needed.
• Enact rules requiring the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to provide technical and financial assistance for installing commercial recharging stations.
• Safeguard electric subsidy funds to ensure ongoing support for small trucking companies after demand grows and subsidy funds shrink.

“The logistics industry has exacerbated inequity by making the planet less livable and providing only working-poverty wages for warehouse workers,” Flaming said. “California’s mandates to replace diesel trucks with zero-emission electric trucks will bring cleaner air and better jobs—if they stay on track. It is crucial that public regulators and utility districts act pragmatically and proactively to ensure that we achieve a successful transition to clean trucking.”