IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
The Inland Empire is at an economic crossroads.
That’s the conclusion of State of Workers in the Inland Empire 2025, a report released this month by the Inland Empire Labor and Community Center at UC Riverside.
While the study has some positive things to say about the Inland economy, its general conclusion is that moving up the economic ladder is becoming increasingly difficult for most people who live in Riverside or San Bernardino counties.
“While (the Inland Empire) has benefited from some positive employment and wage trends, structural inequalities in income and the rising cost of living, especially housing, continue to limit upward mobility,” the report states in its introduction.
That pattern is especially true for renters, low-income households, and minority communities, according to the 38-page study, which focuses on wages, employment, income inequality, and the cost of living. It’s based on data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau during the past three years.
A single parent in the Inland region with two children needs to make more than $106,000 a year to pay for basic living expenses. That’s a threshold many families are not able to meet, especially if they’re living paycheck to paycheck.
Some families whose members have full-time jobs fall into that category, according to the report.
The Inland housing market is particularly difficult on people who rent. The typical Inland renter has about $20,000 less in personal income than a typical homeowner, and local renters must spend about 30 percent of their income on housing in order to survive.
Housing is more affordable in the Inland Empire than it is in other parts of Southern California, particularly the coastal communities, but the cost of housing remains an issue, as it is everywhere in California.
“Housing affordability is a growing concern in the Inland Empire and the state,” the report states. “From 2013 to 2022, median housing costs grew by nearly 20 percent in the Inland
Empire, higher than neighboring counties in Southern California.”
Based on demographics, the Inland economy should perform well against other California submarkets, according to the study.
Riverside and San Bernardino counties both have a slightly younger workforce than the rest of the state: 12.9 percent of its workers are between 18 and 24 years old, compared to 11.8 percent in the rest of Southern California, and 11.97 percent in California.
The prime working-age group, 25 to 54 years old, makes up 67.6 percent of the Inland workforce, a solid number. That’s essentially the same as all other Southern California counties, and close to the statewide number, 68.4 percent.
The Inland Empire has the same number of older workers – 55 to 65 years old – as the rest of the state: 18.66 percent, compared with 19 percent in Southern California and 18, percent statewide.
“California’s population and workforce are expected to age considerably over the next 35 years, but the Inland Empire has a slightly younger workforce and population, so it is in a better position to weather this demographic shift,” the report reads, “A larger share of its population is younger than 16 compared with the rest of California.”
Despite some recent improvement, the Inland workforce has not reached the education levels that workers other parts of the state have reached.
Approximately 33 percent of the Inland workforce has less than a college education, compared to 30.9 percent in Southern California and 29.8 percent statewide.
Only 21.2 percent of the Inland workforce has a bachelor’s degree, and only 11.5 percent has an advanced degree.
Those numbers are a little unusual for a region that has several well-regarded institutions of higher learning, said Manfred Keil, associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College.
“The Inland Empire has its share of higher education,” said Keil, who is also chief economist at the Inland Empire Economic Partnership in Ontario, a nonprofit that promotes economic development and job growth in the two-county region. “It has UC Riverside, Cal State San Bernardino and the University of Redlands. We have to get the people who graduate from those places to stay in the Inland Empire when they start working.”
The main reason those graduates start their careers elsewhere is that the Inland Empire doesn’t offer them many high-paying jobs, even for people who just received their degrees and are entering the job market for the first time.
About 24 percent of the Inland population works in another county – usually Los Angeles, Orange or San Diego – because that’s where the high-paying jobs can be gotten.
“Most people hate to commute to work, but they do it because the Inland Empire is the only place they can afford a home,” Keil said. “They go to work in the coastal counties because that’s where the good jobs are. Unfortunately, right now, there’s not a lot of incentive for businesses with high-paying jobs to come to the Inland Empire.”
The report also discusses the logistics industry, a major employer in both counties. It’s an economic sector that has grown “uncomfortably large” in recent years, according to the report.
That growth has been so strong, especially on the west side, that a resistance to more logistics development is growing.
A group of Inland mayors last year wrote an open letter against the building of more warehouse-distribution centers in both counties, and the local news media has upped its reporting on what would happen if more of those facilities are built: increased traffic, poor air quality, neighborhoods being disrupted, and a regional economy that lacks diversity.
“The Inland Empire needs to add more jobs that provide family-sustaining wages outside of industries related to logistics,” the report concludes. “The most common jobs that have grown in the region are either very low-wage or high-wage jobs.”
