National private equity is buying construction — but not the IE's contractors
Citrus Belt Review: Private equity poured $31.4 billion into construction across an estimated 453 deals in 2025, the sector's strongest year on record per PitchBook — but almost none of it bought the firms that actually pour the IE's slabs.
54 Inland Empire census tracts rank in California's worst 1% for heavy-duty truck soot
Citrus Belt Review: A CARB mapping tool released in January 2026 ranks 54 Inland Empire census tracts in the statewide top 1% for fine-particle pollution from heavy-duty trucks — the first official tract-level cut of the warehouse trade's air cost.
BNSF's $4 billion Barstow rail yard is built to pull transload work out of IE warehouses
Citrus Belt Review: BNSF's Barstow International Gateway is engineered to move container-repacking work — the unloading and reloading that now happens inside Inland Empire warehouses — up to a rail yard 70 miles north, and it just cleared its last local hurdle.
National rail is surging on freight the Inland Empire doesn't run on
Citrus Belt Review: The Association of American Railroads reported a 7.8% jump in rail traffic this week, the kind of number that reads as a logistics recovery. Disaggregated, it's a carload story — grain, metals, autos — and the corridor's actual rail input, the import container, is having a quieter year than the headline suggests.
CAISO's $6.7 billion plan builds for solar in the IE's high desert
Citrus Belt Review: The grid operator's new decade-long buildout names the corridor's own ground — the high desert's Kramer area in San Bernardino County, and Riverside County, both land on the list of solar zones the new transmission is meant to reach.
A CDFI cracks the IE's top-ten SBA lenders — writing the small checks others dropped
Citrus Belt Review: Lendistry's eight approvals averaged $160K against a quarter average of $557K — small-dollar lending in a quarter where small loans fell 39%.
Argentine EV maker Voltu delivers first trucks from its Riverside plant, 400 jobs planned
City of Riverside: Voltu Motor delivered its first production trucks June 9 from Voltu Forge One – Riverside, with the City as its first customer — and the plant is slated to add about 400 manufacturing, engineering, and operations jobs over four years.
Temecula's wine-club economy runs on the customers the fine-wine trade is panicking about
Citrus Belt Review: The fine-wine investment trade keeps framing younger drinkers as a threat — they drink less, moderate more, and spend on experience over status. In Temecula Valley, that's not a warning. It's the customer the region's direct-to-consumer model was built to serve, and the numbers this year say it's working.
Rancho Cucamonga medical office building sells for $7.1 million
Parker Hannifin to buy Corona-based Circor Aerospace from KKR for $2.55 billion
KKR / Circor International: Parker Hannifin agreed on May 21 to buy Circor Aerospace — headquartered in Corona — from private equity firm KKR for $2.55 billion in cash.
Redlands schools delay YMCA after-school vote, push first review to March
Community Forward Redlands: After awarding the Boys & Girls Club a three-year, $11.25 million contract to run after-school programs at seven schools, Redlands Unified isn't phasing the YMCA out — it's giving the longtime provider a parallel deal and more runway to prove a revamped program works.
Caltrans says Carbon Canyon Road truck ban is temporary, tied to plan to widen switchbacks
Champion Newspapers: Caltrans told about 100 Carbon Canyon residents the truck restriction they'd treated as permanent is temporary — and that the agency has long planned to widen the road's switchbacks to move goods through more efficiently.
Redlands adopts six-stage water shortage plan, can restrict ornamental fountains in a drought
Redlands Community News: The council adopted a stand-alone Water Shortage Contingency Plan after a June 2 public hearing, setting a six-stage framework for rationing water during droughts and supply disruptions.
San Bernardino County's gap between what people earn and what they need is the widest in Southern California
Citrus Belt Review: California has the nation's top-ranked economy and one of its worst inequality rankings — 49th of 50. The statewide numbers get the headlines. By the county's own measure, a San Bernardino County family needs about $128,000 a year to cover basic needs and earns a median of roughly $85,000 — a gap wider than Orange County's or Los Angeles County's, in the part of the state long sold as California's last affordable frontier.
The IE's Gen Z Problem Isn't the One in the Headlines
Citrus Belt Review: The national debate blames AI or remote work for young workers' struggles. Both arguments are about a ladder the Inland Empire never had.
Redlands council votes 5–0 to draft a citywide ban on new warehouses
Community Forward Redlands: A unanimous Redlands council told staff to write an ordinance banning new warehouse construction in every zoning district in the city.
Riverside picks LA housing attorney James Johnson as city attorney at $372,624, waives 12-day notice rule to do it
The Raincross Gazette: The council waived its own Sunshine Ordinance to push the hire through as an add-on item, ending a city attorney vacancy that had run since April 2025.
IE logistics shed 2,200 jobs as Washington pitches a faster supply chain
Citrus Belt Review: A container-screening plan unveiled at the Port of Los Angeles this week was sold as relief for a strained supply chain. Sixty miles inland, the region that actually moves the freight is shedding the jobs that strain was supposed to support — and the reasons have little to do with how fast a box clears the dock.
Riverside County FAIR Plan policies jumped 509% in four years as insurers pulled back from wildfire risk
Citrus Belt Review: California homeowners face the nation's steepest projected premium hike in 2026, but the deeper signal in the Inland Empire is where people are buying coverage. Riverside County's policy count on the state's insurer of last resort rose 509% between September 2021 and September 2025 — from 9,364 to 57,026, the steepest four-year climb among California's large counties.
IE warehouse vacancy hit 7.8% as big tenants moved out, but Q1 leasing jumped 45%
Citrus Belt Review: Inland Empire industrial vacancy rose to 7.8% in the first quarter as four tenants each vacated more than a million square feet — but the headline number lags the demand underneath it. CBRE data shows leasing volume jumped 45.5% over the prior quarter to 22.3 million square feet, the strongest sign yet that occupiers are still committing to the region even as the vacancy rate climbs.