Warehouse CITY

The rapid growth in e-commerce and global trade has caused an explosion in warehouse growth in communities near ports.  Southern California's Inland Empire is the warehouse capital of the United States - the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle almost 40% of container traffic coming into the United States.  In the past two decades, about 90% of new warehouse space built in Southern California is in the two inland counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. These two counties have over 4.5 million residents who are exposed to the nation's worst smog in the form of ozone; they rank #1 (SBD) and #2 (RIV) in exceedances of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. 

Local zoning of these warehouses are often right next to neighborhoods, schools, homes, and other vulnerable populations. Communities and nonprofit environmental organizations opposing the construction of new warehouses have asymmetric access to technical information on the cumulative impacts of the goods movement industry on local air quality when attempting to persuade local decision-makers on warehouse projects.  Community voice is expressed through lived experience, but these types of stories are less valued in the public comment process than the technical reports provided by experts paid by developers when zoning projects. 

The Warehouse CITY tool provides a relatively simple dashboard for community groups and members to visualize and quantify warehouse cumulative

impacts on their community.  Cumulative impacts are an EPA and California CEQA legal term referring to the idea that 'two or more individual effects which, when considered together, are considerable or which compound or increase other environmental impacts...The cumulative impact from several projects is the change in the environment which results from the incremental impact from the project when added to other closely related past, present, and reasonably foreseeable future projects.'  This framework is extremely important for warehouse clusters, which individually have little impact; however, in Southern California there are over 9,000 warehouses and most of the warehouse area growth is in the poorer environmental justice areas in the Inland Counties. 

The Warehouse CITY tool allows users to characterize the number, area, and estimated enviromental emissions of warehouses by jurisdiction or specific location on the map.  These can be used to inform and persuade decision-makers on the local and regional impacts of warehouse growth on Inland Empire communities.

The Warehouse CITY is an open-source and publicly available tool.  It uses geospatial information from county assessor databases to identify warehouse parcels within four Southern California counties (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino) with a combined population of just under 20 million people. 

The dashboard displays warehouse polygons are displayed on an interactive leaflet map. A simple summary table shows statistics on the spatial coverage, air quality emissions, and jobs for the existing and planned or approved warehouses for a user-defined area.  A detailed table provides summary information on the individual warehouses within the selected area. 

Advanced users can modify the input variables to adjust calculations and provide sensitivity studies.  This is important because the default values are basin-wide averages and may be less appropriate for individual jurisdictions or projects.  Planners, decision-makers, and community groups can all use the tool to come to consensus on the cumulative impact of warehouses.   

The goal of the Warehouse CITY tool is to help community organizations understand and quantify the cumulative impacts of existing and planned warehouses in their communities.  Currently, technical information on warehouse impacts, quantity, and traffic impacts is asymmetrically available to developers and city planning technocrats but is inaccessible to communities. 

As a result of the asymmetry of information, developer environmental planning documents provide limited information on the true cumulative impacts of warehouses on the Inland Empire communities.  Typically, this is done by limiting the number or spatial extent of environmental analysis to systematically exclude the cumulative impacts of past, present, and probably future projects when considering environmental impacts.  This is explicitly against the plain language of CEQA. 

The Warehouse CITY tool provides an open source solution that provides technical information to community members, planners, and developers.  This tool is purely informational but allows effective communication and quantification of arcane technical information not readily accessible to community members.  Given the large numbers of jurisdictions and diverse sets of stakeholders involved in land-use planning decisions, this tool provides a common ground for assessing community impacts to make effective and informed land-use decisions. 

In essence, this is simply providing a way for community members to quantify their lived experience.  Instead of saying there are too many warehouses, they can say the square footage, the number of trucks, and the pollution.  Quantifying lived experiences elevates its value in the planning process.  Hopefully, this will help provide a framework for disproportionately impacted communities to meaningfully influence the development of local land-use policies as defined in the Environmental Justice rules adopted by the EPA and state of California. 

Radical Reseach LLC and the Robert Redford Conservancy are organizations located within the Inland Empire.  Our team is deeply connected to multiple community organizations including the Sierra Club, Riverside Neighbors Opposing Warehouses, Centers for Community Action and Environmental Justice, the People's Collective for Environmental Justice, The Nature Conservancy, Riverside 350, and many other community organizations trying to shape the vision of the future of the Inland Empire. 

Our team were signatories and coauthors of a recent letter to the Governor of the State of California signed by over 60 organizations.  We were signatories to Assembly Bill 1000.

We are looking to grow this solution both locally within Southern California and extend this application to other areas of the country where similar patterns in warehouse growth exist. 

Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to extend this project to other areas like Northern California or any East Coast ports. It is also unclear how scalable this solution might be given the heterogeneity of open data on public land-use across individual counties. 

Funds from this application would be applied to investigate scalability of this solution to other U.S. areas impacted by rapid warehouse growth.