When the housing market collapsed and construction jobs disappeared, unemployment spiked and tax revenue plummeted. In a city where the median household income is $39,895, more than 200 Police Department employees make more than $100,000 a year, and more than 100 Fire Department employees also earn more than $100,000 a year, according to state data from 2010. “We are blue collar to the core and union to the core.” “It’s part of this labor city being remarkably generous with our city labor groups and our City Council largely being elected by that same set of unions,” he said. “We began the century by literally giving overly generous contracts to our public employees.”Īnd for Morris, that is a key factor in the past and a major challenge in the future. “The City Council during that time – heavily influenced by labor as they always have been here – did not work and maintain a reserve for a rainy day,” he said. Unfortunately, he said, city leaders did not handle the money wisely. “The economy boomed in the early 2000s because that was an economy based on home building and construction,” Morris said. “It was then and is now a blue-collar city,” Morris said.Īnd that, he said, is key to understanding San Bernardino.Ī decade ago, the city’s finances seemed more than stable, bolstered by the Inland Empire’s surging housing market. Husing, a former San Bernardino resident himself, admits the city’s transition from primarily owner-occupied housing to renter occupied, and the escalating crime that resulted, prompted him to move. San Bernardino was ranked the 16th most dangerous city in the country in 2004 and 18th most dangerous in 2005, when gang warfare raged on city streets and contributed to the nearly 60 killings reported that year, galvanizing citizens and community leaders who demanded that the city do something, anything, to curb the violence plaguing the city. You have absentee landlords, and you have this domino effect that hasn’t really stopped.”īy the mid-2000s, crime had become a major concern. “Then you start having the high crime and people coming in to take advantage of cheap real estate. “It was around that time that we started getting the gangs from L.A.,” Cataldo said. Morris concurred, noting that the middle class exodus was followed by an influx of low-income families from troubled neighborhoods in Los Angeles who came seeking low-cost accommodations. Violence started increasing and it became unlivable.” “All these neighborhoods that were always middle class working families all of a sudden went rental. “All through those neighborhoods you could feel the shift in the city,” Husing said. “All of these older people who were working for these companies started taking early retirement, selling their houses and leaving,” said Husing. The opening of the 15 Freeway drew traffic and commerce away from the city, and subsequent closures – the Santa Fe Depot in 1992 and Norton Air Force Base in 1994 – cost tens of thousands more jobs.Īs those jobs disappeared, the city’s demographics changed as workers left to seek employment elsewhere and real estate investors swept in to pick up properties on the cheap. The slide began in 1983, when the Kaiser Steel Mill shut down, idling more than 8,000 workers, said local historian Nick Cataldo. Then came the 1980s, when a series of unfortunate events battered the local economy. “You had a city that was really functioning well, and it was really moving forward,” said Inland Empire economist John Husing. Indeed, it was San Bernardino’s heyday, when the city was a working class hub, rich in diversity, with the Norton Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Depot and the Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana providing jobs for a burgeoning middle class. “I lived in the city, I worked in the city and everyone thought it was a wonderful place to be.” “I remember being very proud,” he said in a Friday interview. The honor is bestowed on 10 cities each year, and in 1977, San Bernardino was the only city west of the Mississippi to be accorded the honor. Attorney’s Office have declined to comment on whether their agencies are involved.įormer San Bernardino Mayor Tom Minor was a city police sergeant in 1977 when San Bernardino was named an All-America City. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has acknowledged a joint investigation of the city’s finances is under way with the county District Attorney’s Office and San Bernardino Police Department.
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