How Giant Amazon Warehouses Are Choking a California Town
Ontario was once at the center of the dairy industry. Now it’s home to Amazon’s largest warehouse and hundreds of others—with dangerous consequences.
Edgar Jaime didn’t realize that the largest Amazon warehouse in the world was being constructed across the street from his vegetable farm in Ontario, Calif., until the walls went up.
Then again, Jaime can’t say he was too surprised.
Over the past decade, once bucolic Ontario has become one of the biggest U.S. hubs for the e-commerce industry. In addition to the 4.1 million-square-foot Amazon facility under construction, three other Amazon facilities, as well as a sprawl of warehouses for FedEx, Nike, and other companies, stretch to the east of Jaime’s farm. A 5.1 million-square-foot logistics center will soon be constructed down the road.
Mucky fields and cattle feedlots around Jaime’s home have been paved over to make way for clean, gray box buildings and herds of 18-wheeler delivery trucks. “You can hardly smell the cow manure in the air anymore,” he says.
Ontario, a 45-minute drive east from Los Angeles, now has the largest amount of warehouse space in the Inland Empire region, and one of the largest in the U.S. Within just a few years, the e-commerce and logistics industries have reshaped not only the town’s landscape but also its air, its job market, its politics, and its way of life.
The changes have come quickly, but also quietly. While neighboring communities have been publicly fighting warehouse projects abutting schools and boxing in homes, in Ontario, many residents say they didn’t notice just how many new warehouses had cropped up on fallow fields and along old country roads—until they were surrounded…
