Is the IE's "commuter economy" changing?

Yes, but only slightly

Last week I was at the 2022 Inland Empire Economic Forecast conference hosted by UC Riverside’s School of Business’ Center for Economic Forecasting and Development. As usual, the main presentation was by Dr. Christopher Thornberg, and it was an excellent summary of current conditions as well as a creative assessment of what lies ahead. For example, his team remains surprisingly optimistic about economic conditions for the rest of 2022 as well as 2023 – they recently came out with a similar assessment of the housing market as well. You can find a link to the conference slides and program here; highly recommended. 

I could write a whole month’s worth of articles just based on this conference, and indeed, I’ll have more to say in later weeks. For now I just wanted to comment on a statistic that came up during the post-conference discussion which sparked my curiosity. The comment came during a question about the usual issue of regional imbalances between housing and jobs, which drives up our commuting statistics to some of the highest in the nation.

Thornberg mentioned that while the IE has been a “commuter economy”, that has been slowly changing over the last few years. I wasn’t aware that the nature of the I.E.’s commuter economy has been changing, but it turns out that Thornberg might be partially right. Place of work statistics from the American Community Survey do show a moderate increase in the number of IE residents (San Bernardino + Riverside Counties) reporting their place of work as in the IE over the last few years. See the chart below.

The 5-year change for the Inland empire is 2.8 percentage points, which is the largest of the other Counties analyzed. The I.E. is still about 10 percentage points lower on this metric than other counties, indicating that we are still very much a commuter economy relative to our neighbors. This will definitely be something to watch over the coming years.