The Inland Empire ( I.E. ), colloquially known as the IE and the 909 , is a metropolitan region centered around the cities of Riverside and San Bernardino in Southern California. The United States Census Bureau defines the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area as consisting of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties; while the New York Times refers to this area as the Inland Empire,, residents of certain areas within the two counties, such as the Coachella and Temecula Valleys, consider themselves separate from the Inland Empire. The Census Bureau-defined area covers more than 27,000 square miles (70,000 km 2 ) and is home to over 4 million people; it is the third most populous metropolitan area in California and 14th most populous in the United States. Over 80% of the area's population resides on the floor of the San Bernardino Valley.
The label Inland Empire evolved informally to distinguish the inland region of Southern California from the coastal regions of Southern California. The Inland Empire is the largest of the three main regions of Southern California in terms of land area.
At the end of the 19th century, the region was a major center of agriculture, including citrus, dairy, and wine-making. Agriculture declined through the 20th century, and since the 1970s a rapidly growing population, fed by families migrating in search of affordable housing, has led to more residential, commercial, and industrial development.
Prior to the mid-19th century, the area was sparsely populated by Native Americans; the Spanish and Mexicans who once controlled the area considered it largely unsuitable for colonization. The first group of White American settlers arrived over the Cajon Pass in 1851, in the form of Mormon pioneers who were the first settlers of San Bernardino. Although the Mormons left a scant six years later, recalled to Salt Lake by Brigham Young during the church's standoff with the US government, more settlers soon followed.
The entire landmass of Southern California was subdivided according to the San Bernardino Meridian, which was first plotted as part of the Public Land Survey System in November 1852, by Col. Henry Washington. Base Line road, a major thoroughfare, today runs from Highland to San Dimas, intermittently along the absolute baseline coordinates plotted by Col. Washington. San Bernardino County was first formed out of parts of Los Angeles County on April 26, 1853. While the partition once included what is today most of Riverside County, the region is not as monolithic as it may sound. Rivalries between Colton, Redlands, Riverside and San Bernardino over the location of the county seat in the 1890s caused each of them to form their own civic communities, each with their own newspapers. On August 14, 1893 the Senate allowed Riverside County to form out of land previously in San Bernardino and San Diego counties, after rejecting a bill for Pomona to split from LA County and become the seat of what would have been called San Antonio County.
The arrival of railroads and the importation of navel and Valencia orange trees in the 1870s touched off explosive growth, with the area quickly becoming a major center for citrus production. This agricultural boom continued with the arrival of water from the Colorado River and the rapid growth of Los Angeles in the early 20th century, with dairy farming becoming another staple industry. In 1926, Route 66 (now known as Foothill Boulevard) came through the northern parts of the area, bringing a stream of tourists and migrants to the region. Still, the region endured as the key part of the Southern California "Citrus belt" until the end of World War II, when a new generation of real-estate developers bulldozed acres of agricultural land to build suburbs. The precursor to the San Bernardino Freeway, the Ramona Expressway, was built in 1944, and further development of the freeway system facilitated the expansion of suburbs and human migration throughout the Inland Empire and Southern California.
The region experienced significant economic and population growth through most of the later half of the twentieth century. In the early 1990s, the loss of the region's military bases and reduction of nearby defense industries due to the end of the Cold War lead to a local economic downturn. The region as a whole had partially recovered from this downturn by the turn of the century through the development of warehousing, shipping, logistics and retail industries, primarily centered around Ontario. However, these industries have been heavily affected by the global late-2000s recession.
The term "Inland Empire" is documented to have been used by the Riverside Enterprise newspaper (now The Press-Enterprise) as early as April 1914. Developers in the area likely introduced the term to promote the region and to highlight the area's unique features. The "Inland" part of the name is derived from the region's location about 37 miles (60 km) inland from the Pacific Ocean (from Huntington Beach) and east of Downtown Los Angeles; it originally referred to the acres of citrus groves that once extended from Pasadena to Redlands during the early half of the 20th century. The Inland Empire today is considered to stretch from the Los Angeles County - San Bernardino County border through the San Bernardino Valley, encompassing the San Bernardino Mountains and the high and low deserts to the Nevada and Arizona state lines.
Physical boundaries between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire from west to east are the San Jose Hills splitting the San Gabriel Valley from the Pomona Valley, leading to the urban populations centered in the San Bernardino Valley. From the south to north, the Santa Ana Mountains physically divide Orange County from San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. The Santa Rosa Mountains, as well as the Southern California portion of the Sonoran Desert, physically divide Riverside County from San Diego County. Interconnectivity provided by one of the most comprehensive freeway systems in the United States has eroded any sense of physical boundaries between the Inland Empire and the greater Los Angeles area.
Unlike most metropolitan areas that have grown up around a central city, the Inland Empire centers around two large sized cities, Riverside and San Bernardino, with the help of many other small cities and unincorporated communities that together form the 14th-largest metropolitan area in the nation. Los Angeles County and Orange County border the Inland Empire to the west; Inyo and Kern to the north, San Diego and Imperial County to the south and the States of Arizona and Nevada to the east.
Suburban sprawl, centering around the cities of Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ontario, spreads out to form a unified whole with the Greater Los Angeles Area, with further development encroaching past the mountains into the outlying desert areas. The San Bernardino valley floor houses roughly over 80% of the total human population in the Inland Empire.
Elevations range from 11,499 feet (3,505 m) at the top of the San Gorgonio Mountain to 220 ft (-67.1 m) below sea level at the Salton Sea. The San Bernardino mountains are home to the San Bernardino National Forest and the resort communities of Big Bear Lake, Lake Arrowhead, and Running Springs. The Santa Ana River extends from Mt. San Gorgonio for nearly 100 miles (160 km) through San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties before it eventually spills into the Pacific Ocean at Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. While temperatures are generally cool to cold in the mountains, it can get hot in the valleys. In the desert resort of Palm Springs, near Joshua Tree National Park, summer temperatures can reach well over 110 degrees.
The developed area of the IE consists of the Chino Valley, Coachella Valley, Cucamonga Valley, Menifee Valley, Murrieta Valley, Perris Valley, San Bernardino Valley , Temecula Valley, and Victor Valley. The Inland Empire is popular for recreational activities such as skiing the San Bernardino Mountains. In Southwestern Riverside County, Lake Elsinore is popular among boating enthusiasts.
The Inland Empire is also referred to, sometimes derogatorily, as the 909 , after one of the region's larger area codes. In 2004, because of growing demand for telephone numbers, most of Riverside County was granted a new area code, 951.
Inexpensive land prices (compared to Los Angeles and Orange Counties), a large supply of vacant land, and a transport network where many highways and railroads intersect have made the Inland Empire a major shipping hub. Some of the nation's largest manufacturing comp
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