Overview: Alberto Hernandez Maldonando, a resident of a neighborhood near San Bernardino, has seen his health deteriorate over the past decade due to the increasing contamination and traffic caused by the reclassification of the area from residential to commercial-industrial. Maldonando believes that the warehouses and airport have caused respiratory problems for many residents, including himself, and that the promised jobs have not benefited the community. He has become a community leader, fighting for better infrastructure and workforce development, and has successfully stopped plans to demolish homes in the area. Despite his health struggles, Maldonando continues to advocate for his community.
Aryana Noroozi
Each night, Alberto Hernandez Maldonando connects himself to an oxygen machine before he goes to sleep. His mouth goes dry. His body cannot fall into a deep sleep—even sleep is a challenge these days.
“Connecting to that oxygen machine is awful,” he said. “I can’t sleep. My body gets to the hour when I need to sleep and my mouth goes dry with the machine. It’s like my body doesn’t want to sleep. And the doctor, all the doctor does is say, ‘I’ll give you a sleeping pill.'”
Maldonando has lived in the same neighborhood near San Bernardino for decades. He is not an elderly man. But his body, he says, tells a different story than the one he once expected to live.
He now takes approximately 10 medications. He sees his doctor two to three times a month. He cannot walk long distances. He has been told he lacks oxygen, which in turn, has affected his heart and lungs.
“It’s not that I’m very old,” Maldonando said. “It affected my heart, it affected my lungs. Before, I didn’t take any medication. I worked, I went here and there. Now I can’t walk much.”
He believes he knows exactly why.
A changing community
Maldonando remembers the neighborhood the way it was before. He points to the year 1995, as a before-and-after marker.
“[In] ’95 it was better,” he said. “There wasn’t so much contamination, so much traffic, so many warehouses. There were no warehouses. Amazon didn’t exist.”
The community he describes was quiet, residential, and manageable. Families knew what they had moved into. They did not know how quickly – and quietly – that would change.
The Letter Nobody Asked For
About 15 years ago, Maldonando and his neighbors received a notice in the mail. Their neighborhood, long zoned as residential, was being reclassified as commercial-industrial. There was no community vote. nor public processes that residents recall being part of – but there was a letter.
“They sent us a note about 15 years ago saying it was no longer residential [but] now it was commercial-industrial,” Maldonando said. “And after that letter, that’s when the warehouses started appearing and they brought in the airport… they never warned us about any of it.”
What followed, Maldonando said, was a slow transformation of the landscape around him, followed by a slow deterioration of his own health.
“About 10 years ago is when I started getting worse; my health started deteriorating,” he said. “I started having asthma, I started having what the doctor called sinusitis. He said it was from the change in climate, from the plants.”
He soon realized it was not, but rather from the smog and contamination that has become increasingly noticeable.
Solidarity in Struggle
Maldonando’s story is not his alone.
He has spent years walking through his community, knocking on doors, talking to neighbors. What he hears repeated back to him is a pattern: children with asthma, elderly people with comorbid health issues, families trying to make sense of health problems that seem to have arrived alongside the trucks and the warehouses.
“It’s not just me – several people I’ve talked to walking through the community complain that their children have asthma, or older people are getting sick from breathing problems,” he said. “Many respiratory problems in general. The warehouses are harming us because so many trailers come through, and the airport because there are so many flights. The contamination is terrible.”
It doesn’t stop at just the air: the roads that were once calm residential streets now function as shortcuts for trucks or traffic rerouting to avoid heavy truck traffic on the main roads. Intersections go without crosswalks. Sidewalks appear in front of warehouses and disappear again on the residential side. Children cannot safely ride bicycles and walking to school has become a calculation of risk.
“They only fix the sidewalk right in front of the warehouse, but on the other side of the street – nothing,” Maldonando said. “There’s no crosswalk to cross the street on the airport side. They only put sidewalks where it’s convenient for them.”
Maldonando has brought these concerns to public meetings, to county representatives, to anyone who would listen. “We’ve gone to public comment, we’ve told the government and county representatives what’s happening,” he said. “But they don’t listen. They don’t listen at all.”
The Promise of Jobs
Defenders of warehouse development often cite one primary benefit: jobs. Maldonando says he has heard this argument hundreds of times throughout the rise of warehousing. He doesn’t accept it.
“They promise they’re going to bring better jobs to our community here, and it’s a lie,” he said. “If a warehouse comes from Los Angeles, they bring their workers from Los Angeles. They don’t give jobs to people in the community. That’s more traffic and more contamination.”
He points to a specific example he says that he witnessed firsthand. A warehouse that relocated from Los Angeles to Fontana brought its workforce with it. When it subsequently relocated again – this time to Perris – the Fontana workers followed. The communities in between were left with the traffic and the pollution and none of the promised employment.
Even for those who do find work in the warehouses, Maldonando raises a harder question.
“The most these warehouses pay is $16 an hour,” he said. “Do you think $16 an hour is enough to pay your rent, your food, your housing, your clothes, your shoes, everything? They realize it’s not enough, so they work three jobs or three families live together.”
A community reimagined
Ask Maldonando what he wants instead and he answers without hesitation. Not warehouses. Not more truck routes. Not the infrastructure built only where it serves industry.
“What we need are homes, parks, trees, not more contamination,” he said. “We need parks, schools, a good clinic, and a community center.”
He is particularly passionate about workforce development – not the kind the warehouses claim to offer, but something more lasting.
“There are people who have worked 20 years and don’t know how to do anything other than what they do there,” he said. “They need a center where they can be trained for other jobs. Because those warehouses help with nothing. Maybe if they put a community training center – to teach young people and adults things like masonry, electricity — because many of us are in a warehouse stacking boxes, [and if] they let you go after 10-20 years, you don’t know how to do anything. Not even fill out an application.”
He speaks from experience. When he last sought employment, he was told that paper applications were no longer accepted. Without computer access, the door closed.
A collective fight back
Several years ago, organizers began knocking on doors in Maldonando’s neighborhood. They came with information: the city had plans to demolish homes in the area to make way for further development. Many residents had heard similar warnings before and dismissed them. Maldonando was skeptical too, that was until the visits became more frequent, more serious, more organized.
“They came, knocked on doors, and started explaining [how] they knew they wanted to demolish the houses,” he said. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, they’ve been saying that for 20 years, they won’t do it.’ But this time it felt more serious.”
Meetings began in the streets. One was held in Alberto’s own home. Residents who had lived side by side for years started talking about what was happening to all of them. Maldonando – sick, on oxygen, struggling to walk – began knocking on doors alongside the organizers.
“That’s how I became a community leader,” he said. “I go with them, I attend meetings, we walk and knock on doors to inform people about what’s happening.”
The campaign worked. With the help of an attorney and a formal lawsuit, the demolition plans were stopped. “They helped us get a lawyer, we filed a lawsuit, and we won,” he said.
Still Knocking on Doors
Maldonando still goes out. He still walks the neighborhood – as far as his lungs allow. He still shows up to public comment meetings, still talks to neighbors who tell him the warehouses will bring opportunity, still pushes back with the patience of someone who has been doing this a long time.
He is sustained, in part, by the example of the organizers who came from outside the community, from Los Angeles, from Orange County, to fight a fight that wasn’t technically theirs to fight.
“Maybe they have a salary, but they have no obligation to come fight with us,” he said. “It’s not their community. It’s not their obligation, but they do it anyway. That made me stronger.”
“I like helping people,” Maldonando added. “Seeing that they come, take the time, and treat this as their own community even though it’s not – that gives me more strength.”
Every night, he still connects the machine. Every morning, he gets up ready to fight for his community.
Editor’s note: Alberto Hernandez Maldonando was interviewed primarily in Spanish. All quotes have been translated