3rd world Cartel-fornia: San Bernardino seeks bankruptcy protection

San Bernardino seeks bankruptcy protection - latimes.com

"San Bernardino on Tuesday became the third California city in less than a month to seek bankruptcy protection, with officials saying the financial situation had become so dire that it could not cover payroll through the summer. ...
The unexpected vote came at the suggestion of the interim city manager, who said the city faces a $46-million deficit and depleted coffers."

http://www.trbimg.com/img-4ffd97d3/turbine/la-discuss-san-bernardino-bankruptcy-0711-sl/187/16x9
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/live-chat-how-many-other-california-cities-fast-bankruptcy-risk.html

Shorthand:
   San Berdoo=San Bernardino City and/ or County of same name

   IE = Inland empire, the regional informal nickname describing entire
          settled region of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties west and
          south of the SoCal Transverse ranges (San Bernardino Mountains and
San Jacinto Mountain ranges). e.g., Palm Springs is not part of the IE.

Some traditionalists have restricted the term 'Inland Empire' to refer to the
original old core cities of San Bernardino, Redlands, Riverside City,
Fontana, and Colton, before the Empire began sprouting endless suburban
offshoots beginning in the 1970's

RIP to the San Bernardino i remember back in the 70's. Back then it was a pleasant rural/rurban community of farms, pastures, endless orange groves,orchards, county ranch homes, rustic church steeples, rural pleasant country roads, and the 1/2 mile wide rocky-bed Santa Ana river, which was still a rugged semi-wilderness bush-lined streambed worth a days exploration. This was how I remember SB back in the early-mid 70's when i used to visit my in-laws there.

It was not completely idyllic back then. From May thru October it would be steamy, muggy and hot, with yellowish air due to all that smog rolling eastward from LA into the IE, where the San Berdoo mts would trap it. San Berdoo had not yet become a dismal derelict impoverished 3rd world destination for millions of LA immigrant illegals and LA ghetto expats fleeing the LA slums to find cheap affordable single family homes, but there was back then signs of barrio poverty in the inner San Berdoo ghetto areas. The great coastal exodus from LA to the IE took place from the 80's all way into the first decade of the 21st century, and reached a peak during the great IE housing boom of 2000-2007.

During that period the formerly rural aspects of San Berdoo, and entire IE, underwent drastic changes, being literally bulldozed and razed into huge new housing tracts and endless retail malls. SB/IE was a developers free-for all, not subject to rigorous environmental reviews nor any type of government planning. I traveled a great deal thru the IE in the course of work duties almost entire decade of the 2000's and witnessed first hand the enviro-devastation wrought by haphazard unplanned, roughshod RE and infrastructure development. The over-crowded LA and OC coasts saw millions of its inhabitants, squeezed by rising RE prices and tightly-packed LA coastal burgs, fleeing into the still-wide open expansive IE to pick up overpriced, but by coastal CA RE standards, cheaper large single family homes put up in droves all over San Berdoo and Riverside County. They were using liar loans and other RE mortgage trickery/ gimmicks to get into these homes with virtually no down payment and low teaser interest rates, which when the mortgages ballooned, and the Mortgage monthly payments doubled or tripled, they ran into trouble when the enire CA and USA economy collapsed in 2007-2008.

During the 2000 decade San Berdoo and Riverside PPL went up 3x-5x-fold during this period, and home tracts mushroomed like gigantic algae blooms. Problem was there was no jobs/industry diversification at all in the IE. The San Berdoo economy was basically only logistics, trucking, distribution, construction, retail, a few office jobs, and even fewer government jobs. The IE had a flimsly base of economic under-pilling to support such an explosive population and housing growth during this period.

There were scattered pockets of small workshops and corporate semi-industrial tracts scattered here and there, but most of these these firms were only about warehousing and distribution to handle the massive volumes of imports from Asia/China, which were unloaded from LA Ports and initially shipped to gigantic IE warehouses for later trans-shipments all across US via 18-wheelers or less likely, trains.

There was never any sort of traditional manufacturing of big durable goods at all in the IE . There was the massive iconic Fontana Steel Mill, but that was basially a hulking rust-belt symbol of the long-past golden age of USA/SoCal manufacturing might, dating from the WW2 generation up to the 70s-80's. Rancho Cucamonga did have incipient small-workshop, small business/entrepreneual-level development, as did Upland, Temecula, Ontario, and Moreno Valley, but they were all in incipient embyronic stages and could not be fully expanded-built-up to fill the needs of a rapidly expanding IE for more massive domestic industrial jobs-creating infrastructure development.

This is why San Berdoo filed BK. Simply put, the real basis of wealth-large corporations and large well-tended corporate parks, was never there. lack of large established blue-chip corporations and RE collapsing values doomed the city into a slow bleeding death - the great USA economic collapse of 2008-2012 simply accelerated this trend.

San Berdoo sort of became what we see in Detroit. The tax paying base simply vanished or shrunk. There never was any high-paying unionized middle class-supporting jobs and middle-class factory workers. Ephemeral hi-paying Contruction jobs and hi-flying contracting firms all shrunk drastically during 2007-2010 IE real estate crash. IE is now all low-paying retail jobs. There is little or no tourism left in the formerly rural, scenic orange grove country, which was virtually all plowed under and replaced by endless brown-stucco-ed home tracts and malls.