New rules governing warehouses and trucking routes, longstanding policing accountability requirements andpersistent housing cost pressures are converging across the Inland Valley, research suggests Black residents could experience outsized effects, even when laws are race-neutral on their face.

One of the biggest policy shifts arrives through Assembly Bill (AB) 98, a California logistics law approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 29, 2024.

The statute says that beginning Jan. 1, 2026, it will impose statewide design and operational standards on certainnew or expanded “logistics use” developments, a category that includes large warehouses.

AB 98 also contains a regional provision aimed directly at the Inland Empire.

The bill states that, subject to an appropriation, the South Coast Air Quality Management District must deploy mobile air monitoring systems in Riverside and San Bernardino counties from Jan. 1, 2026, until Jan. 1, 2032, to collect air pollution measurements in communities near operational logistics developments.

Research indicates why the freight and warehouse focus matters for equity.

A peer-reviewed GeoHealth study examining Southern California from 2000 to 2019 found warehouse expansion was associated with higher ambient PM2.5 — fine particulate matter from sources like diesel trucks, warehouses, wildfires, industrial activity, and even cooking that is 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter, so tiny that it’s about 1/30th the width of a human hair — and elemental carbon, with impacts concentrated in socially disadvantagedcommunities, according to the article indexed by PubMed Central and PubMed.

Separate peer-reviewed national research in Science Advances has found that Black Americans and other people ofcolor are disproportionately exposed to PM2.5 pollution from many sources.

The region already has a major warehouse rule on the books.

The South Coast AQMD says its Rule 2305, known as the WAIRE Program, is an “indirect source rule” designed tocut emissions associated with goods movement, and it applies to warehouses with at least 100,000 square feet of indoor floor space.

The rule states its purpose is to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter linked to warehouses and the mobile sources attracted to them.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in a 2024 announcement about approving the rule into California’s air plan, also described it as reducing harmful pollutants associated with warehouse operations, including trips by trucks delivering goods to and from facilities.

At the same time, research suggests policing policy remains a daily-life flashpoint for Black residents.

California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), known as AB 953, prohibits racial and identity profiling and requireslaw enforcement agencies to report stop data and complaints to the state Department of Justice, which also convenes the RIPA Board.

Nationally, a peer-reviewed analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour found evidence of persistent racial disparities in police traffic stops across nearly 100 million stops, including results consistent with bias in stop decisions using the “veil of darkness” approach.

Housing is another domain where unequal baseline conditions mean policy changes can land unevenly.

Census data summarized by Reuters reported that 56.2% of Black renter households in the United States were “cost-burdened” in 2023, paying more than 30% of income on housing, compared with 46.7% of white renter households.

And peer-reviewed research has found large racial gaps in homelessness exposure over the life course.

A study in Demography reported lifetime homelessness rates were higher for non-Hispanic Black respondents than for non-Hispanic white respondents.

Local ordinances can intersect with those pressures.

In Ontario, for example, the city’s municipal code contains an “oversized vehicle parking” section that regulates when large vehicles may be parked on public streets, and the city also describes an oversized vehicle permit program on its website.

Because the code text and the city’s program description do not match on every dimensional threshold, residents and reporters typically treat the municipal code as the controlling legal language while using city guidance for practical compliance details.

Taken together, the legal landscape points to a familiar dynamic: policies that govern environmental exposure,enforcement discretion and housing instability can produce unequal outcomes where unequal conditions already exist.

The next major AB 98 deadlines and monitoring requirements, along with enforcement under Rule 2305 and continuedRIPA stop-data reporting, will provide new data points, and potential political pressure, as Inland Valley officials weigh growth, public health and equity.