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When your house is surrounded by massive warehouses
Valdepeña, 79, said she doesn’t go outside unless she has to, or even open the windows. Doing so lets in the smell of fumes from idling engines and the sounds of trucks docking and unloading late into the night.
“You want to know about the warehouses? They ruined my life,” she said.
The noise, the air pollution and the trucks are a daily reality for the dozens of working-class, mostly Latino residents of Rose Avenue in south Fontana. They have been surrounded by warehouses in the last five years as the Inland Empire has been transformed into a national logistics hub, with local officials jockeying to roll out the red carpet for the industry.
The warehouses have brought thousands of jobs to a place where residents have often struggled with high unemployment and long commutes. Their proliferation makes it possible for Southern Californians to buy something online and have it arrive at their doors within hours.
But the industrial boom has brought warehouse projects closer to homes, despite health warnings from state air quality officials, who recommend against housing people within 1,000 feet of such facilities because of harmful truck pollution.
In Fontana, where Mayor Acquanetta Warren prides herself on being nicknamed “Warehouse Warren,” developers have dramatically reshaped the city, buying dozens of single-family homes, horse properties, chicken ranches and other small businesses and tearing them down to build millions of square feet of distribution centers for Amazon, UPS and others.
Developers offered to buy Valdepeña’s home and those of her neighbors, but they refused to sell, and the warehouses went up around them. In Valdepeña’s case, one warehouse’s perimeter wall is right at her property line, 150 feet from her back window.
“Boxed. We’re boxed in from either direction,” said Josie Kuhl, 64, who has lived on Rose Avenue for 30 years. “We hear the forklifts at night. The rumbling of trucks when they’re docking, it’s just nonstop.”
Through the decades, Fontana has undergone continual reinvention — from the small town that drew Angelenos east with the promise of a more rural life, to one of the largest steel producers in the nation during World War II, to a working-class bedroom community for L.A. and Orange counties.
The warehouses, as Warren sees it, will once again remake Fontana: from a community whose residents face arduous commutes into a city where they just cross the street to get to work.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-27/fontana-california-warehouses-inland-empire-pollution
14 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
with the same sort of issues...
1.5 Million Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to N.Y. Streets
By Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu
Oct. 27, 2019
An Amazon order starts with a tap of a finger. Two days later — or even in a matter of hours — the package arrives. It seems simple enough. But to deliver Amazon orders and countless others from businesses that sell over the internet, the very fabric of major urban areas around the world is being transformed. And New York City, where more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily, shows the impact that this push for convenience is having on gridlock, roadway safety and pollution.
Delivery trucks operated by UPS and FedEx double-park on streets and block bus and bike lanes. They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year, a 34 percent increase from 2013. The main entryway for packages into New York City, leading to the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, has become the most congested interchange in the country. Trucks heading toward the bridge travel at 23 miles per hour, down from 30 m.p.h. five years ago.
While the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber has unquestionably caused more traffic, the proliferation of trucks has worsened the problem. As a result, cars in the busiest parts of Manhattan now move just above a jogger’s pace, about 7 m.p.h., roughly 23 percent slower than at the beginning of the decade. Neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn, are being used as logistics hubs to get packages to customers faster than ever. At least two million square feet of warehouse space is being built in New York, including what will be the largest center of its kind in the country. Amazon added two warehouses in the city over the summer.
The immense changes in New York have been driven by tech giants, other private businesses and, increasingly, by independent couriers, often without the city’s involvement, oversight or even its awareness, The New York Times found. Officials are racing to keep track of the numerous warehouses sprouting up, to create more zones for trucks to unload and to encourage some deliveries to be made by boat as the city struggles to cope with a booming online economy.
/snip
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-delivery.html
By Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu
Oct. 27, 2019
An Amazon order starts with a tap of a finger. Two days later — or even in a matter of hours — the package arrives. It seems simple enough. But to deliver Amazon orders and countless others from businesses that sell over the internet, the very fabric of major urban areas around the world is being transformed. And New York City, where more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily, shows the impact that this push for convenience is having on gridlock, roadway safety and pollution.
Delivery trucks operated by UPS and FedEx double-park on streets and block bus and bike lanes. They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year, a 34 percent increase from 2013. The main entryway for packages into New York City, leading to the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, has become the most congested interchange in the country. Trucks heading toward the bridge travel at 23 miles per hour, down from 30 m.p.h. five years ago.
While the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber has unquestionably caused more traffic, the proliferation of trucks has worsened the problem. As a result, cars in the busiest parts of Manhattan now move just above a jogger’s pace, about 7 m.p.h., roughly 23 percent slower than at the beginning of the decade. Neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn, are being used as logistics hubs to get packages to customers faster than ever. At least two million square feet of warehouse space is being built in New York, including what will be the largest center of its kind in the country. Amazon added two warehouses in the city over the summer.
The immense changes in New York have been driven by tech giants, other private businesses and, increasingly, by independent couriers, often without the city’s involvement, oversight or even its awareness, The New York Times found. Officials are racing to keep track of the numerous warehouses sprouting up, to create more zones for trucks to unload and to encourage some deliveries to be made by boat as the city struggles to cope with a booming online economy.
/snip
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/nyregion/nyc-amazon-delivery.html
is down in South Philly near 2nd & Oregon, just a few blocks from the Delaware River. There are train tracks that run through that area and piers nearby as well... and they are a few miles from the airport where their planes have their own terminal.
It's always been "industrial" in that area (including what had once been part of the largest oil refinery on the east coast), so as a way to mitigate some of this because it was also along a bird migration route, the "John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge" had been created not far away, years ago.
The big Amazon fulfillment center near here is across the river in Swedesboro, NJ -
UPS was warning potential home buyers to ward off the inevitable complains. They had moved out the middle of nowhere to avoid the complaints but the people followed.
As I recall, people complain about the trucks starting up early in the morning.
I lived near a uhaul business. Early in the morning, every truck was started up. 
Gawd knows why. Made it hard to sleep late. The place backed my condo complex and it took me awhile to figure out where that rumbling noise was coming from.
