text: John Weeks: The Inland Empire must repair its poor reputation – San Bernardino Sun
  John Weeks: The Inland Empire must repair its…
  We used to be the beautiful people, the privileged few, the well-to-do elite of Southern California.
  Now, we're the poor people.
  The Inland Empire is No. 1 on a list, just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, of the poorest large metropolitan areas in the nation.
  For more than a century, starting in the 1870s, tycoons came here to build their mansions, in communities like San Bernardino, Redlands, Ontario and Riverside. Fortunes were made in our vineyards and citrus orchards. San Bernardino built an opera house four years before Los Angeles did. Hollywood filmmakers premiered their movies here, not there.
  Our hotels were the finest in the Southwest. Kings and presidents stayed at the Mission Inn in Riverside. Stars of stage and screen checked in at the California Hotel in San Bernardino. They partied at San Bernardino's Arrowhead Springs Hotel. Judy Garland performed there. Lucille Ball and Dezi Arnaz spent their summer vacations there. Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned there.
  Celebrities built homes around our mountain lakes and in our desert resorts.
  People from Los Angeles and Orange counties came here to dine and shop. Harris' in San Bernardino was the finest department store of its time. Milton Sage invented one-stop shopping at his Sage's Complete Market, also in San Bernardino. The McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice, revolutionized the American restaurant industry when they converted their San Bernardino hamburger restaurant to a drive-in.
  The city's National Orange Show was one of the West's most popular attractions, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The city's mineral water resorts, at Urbita and Harlem and Arrowhead Springs, provided year-round fun for visitors from throughout Southern California.
  A hundred wineries in the Cucamonga Valley also drew visitors every day.
  There's no doubt about it, the Inland Empire was the place to be.
  Our century-long heyday seems to have ended with a run of bad luck starting in the 1980s when Kaiser Steel in Fontana closed, Campus Crusade for Christ relocated its world headquarters from San Bernardino to Florida, Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino shut down, and Santa Fe Railway in San Bernardino moved away.
  We lost a lot of jobs. And I guess we started feeling like unfortunates. We started to feel like losers.
  Misery loves company and we started welcoming more and more unfortunates into our midst. We demolished downtown landmarks so we could build more and more low-cost housing units. We lost homeowners and gained renters. We ripped out the last of our vineyards and groves and replaced them with strip malls and warehouses. We lost locally owned businesses and gained absentee-owned businesses.
  Feeling like we were poor people was bad enough, but we started acting like poor people, too. We even started being poor people.
  But listen, the Mission Inn still is in business, and the Arrowhead Springs Hotel still exists, though it is empty. The Inland Empire still has mineral springs. It still has spectacular mountain and desert resorts . It has two of America's most popular national parks, as well as one of its largest national preserves. It still has its prime location in the center of all that Southern California has to offer. It still has year-round wonderful weather.
  We need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and start feeling lucky again.
  Money follows money, just as poverty breeds poverty.
  We need to build more high-cost housing and less low-cost housing. We need to build more high-end malls and fewer strip malls. We need to develop, not neglect, our recreational amenities. We need to do a better job of selling others on ourselves. We need to do a better job of selling ourselves on ourselves.
  We need to turn our frowns upside down and start acting like a better class of people. Maybe we'll find that a better class of people starts to join us here. And maybe we'll find that the people who insist on feeling and acting like unfortunates, like losers, will start to feel less and less welcome here.
  Maybe at some time in the future, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases a list of America's poorest large metropolitan areas, the Inland Empire will not be No. 1. It won't be on that list at all.