The Economist recently had an article about the Inland Empire, my neck of the woods.  Specifically, Moreno Valley:

Until recently Moreno Valley was one of the fastest-growing cities in America. It lies in the Inland Empire, a two-county region in southern California that is so called largely because it is difficult to know how else to characterise such a sprawling expanse of detached homes, strip malls and warehouses. Between 1990 and 2007 the Inland Empire’s population grew from 2.6m to 4.1m—the equivalent of adding a city the size of Philadelphia.

Adding a city the size of Philadelphia!  The Inland Empire, “the IE”, is probably best understood in the context of Phoenix and Las Vegas, two other neighboring large desert metropolitan areas of the southwest facing rapid growth.  The Census Bureau’s ‘metropolian statistical area’ (MSA) category ranks the IE just below San Francisco and Phoenix and larger than Seattle and Minneapolis, making the Inland Empire the 14th largest MSA in the United States.

Can you imagine?  A ‘city’ larger than Seattle or Minneapolis, a city that grew by a Philadelphia in the past twenty years — and no one’s ever heard of it!  It used to be known as the Citrus Empire, the home of the navel orange, and only recently has its explosive growth driven it to the edges of Los Angeles and Orange county to the west and San Diego to the south.  The population is still concentrated in the San Bernardino valley, where more than eighty percent of the population lives.  Vast swathes of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, stretching all the way to the Nevada and Arizona borders, are empty desert.

The Inland Empire, earthquake country, is at the epicenter of the housing bubble; the foreclosure rate in Riverside and San Bernardino counties is among the highest in the country and there are lots of developments — in places like Moreno Valley — that were built but never sold.  The brief history of the Inland/Citrus Empire is one of booms and busts; this is just the latest, spectacular, episode.