Moreno Valley Comeback
Decennial census information is important because of what it tells us about who we are. Where we live. How many of us are married. How many children we have. Whether we rent or own our homes. How much time we take getting to work. How we get there. How much education we have.
But the information sometimes tells who we are not -- that is, it dispels image of ourselves that were never accurate or are outdated. And that's equally important.
A prime example is Moreno Valley, which went through some tough times in the early 1990s, but today isn't the community you may think it is. For example, its median household income, a key measure of a community's economic vitality and an important statistic for its future development, closed the decade at
$47,387, substantially higher than Riverside's and comparable to Redlands'. That's right, Redlands, the city so often associated with affluence in the region.
Make no mistake, Moreno Valley had some hard times in the 1990s. That median household income number grew by only 12.3 percent in the decade, while the norm was more like 20 percent. Redlands, a big winner, added nearly 30 percent.
So part of Moreno Valley's strong close of the decade resulted from its strong beginning. It was the boom town of the 1980s, both in population growth and in establishing an economic base. Some retrenchment was inevitable, but it got more than retrenchment in the early 1990s.
The downgrading of March Air Force Base was a body blow, as it was almost everywhere else where a large military installation shut down or changed status. If things were bad in Riverside County, they were worse in Moreno Valley.
For example, the county's property value, reflected in the 1994-95 tax roll, took an almost unprecedented fall of less than one half of 1 percent, while Riverside's was up 1 percent and Temecula's, 0.6 percent. And when the county real estate
recession got really bad, declining 0.7 percent on the 1996-97 roll, Moreno Valley's was down 4.5 percent. (In contrast, Riverside's was down just 2 percent and Temecula's was actually up 1.4 percent.)
That's not the case anymore. Assessed valuation was up more than 9 percent on the current role over the previous, almost as much as the county as a whole. What's more, about 70 percent of the city homes are owner occupied. Such a high rate signals to outsiders a stable community of well-cared for properties.
No, Moreno Valley isn't that sea of For Sale signs, of declining property values, of unemployment, of high crime where everybody wants out. On the contrary, it grew respectably through the 1990s, about 20 percent, and based on the numbers it put up by the end of the decade, namely medium household income, should be
ready to grow some more.
Redlands and Moreno Valley, it turns out, are closer, in some ways, than even the narrow canyons that separate them.
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