Once viewed as a viable economic frontier filling the citrus tree basin of high winds launching from snowcapped mountains, the Inland Empire has struggled more than most regions in the U.S. since the great recession.

Going by Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for the federally-defined Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario area, unemployment is at 13.9 percent — two points higher than the rest of the state. Fifty percent of all homes in the region are valued at less than the mortgages taken out to purchase them, tying an albatross around the finances of home owners — many of them first time buyers. And though the Inland Empire has 244,000 people formally unemployed, the region’s senior economist, John Husing, announced on Thursday he projects job growth for the year to be a very paltry 5,200 new additions to pay rolls.

Perhaps most sobering is Husing’s prediction another five years are necessary before the region recovers all the jobs it lost during the recession.

But where there is a shortage of jobs, education opportunities and social benefits that encourage the acquisition of contemporary skills can offset the long-term projections of stagnant economic growth. For leading economists, that underdeveloped nexus of jobs and education is dampening the fortunes of the region. Husing told the Inland News Today, “If we do not wake up…and start to undertake major efforts to change, particularly, the education level of our population and our young people, we’re going to be stuck with a difficult situation for a very long time.”

Brad Kemp, an economist at Beacon Economics and a close follower of California’s hamstrung macroeconomic fortunes, says part of the problem is that not enough federal programs finance job-specific education courses.

“Politicians want a shiny bauble,” Kemp said in an interview with TAI, but “paying for the short-term pain that leads to a better economic future” is not in their agenda.

He cautions nothing guarantees a return to good fortunes without essential upgrades in education and how communities seek out new engines of growth.

“We need a curriculum shift to the core subjects plus the arts,” he says, calling his version STEAM for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math. “Investments in mid-level education opportunities like community colleges and associates degrees” encourage expanding firms to take advantage of cheaper prices and set up their production facilities in these otherwise depressed areas, he argues.

He points to quick-fix tax incentives to large retail stores as an example of short term thinking that will not help a local economy.

“Retail doesn’t increase quality of life,” Kemp says. “You cannot improve the standard of living if you don not improve the wealth of your consumer base,” adding a community employed only by big-box stores means few can purchase the goods they are selling.

Recent examples of successful economic development in the region include the city of Moreno Valley building a 1.8 million square foot warehouse and distribution center for Skechers footwear. The company’s headquarters are based in the much more expensive and congested coastal town of Manhattan Beach. Thus, choosing Moreno Valley meant expanding operations cheaply but domestically.

Kemp’s other recommendations for the region include shifting away from transportation projects that are exclusively highways. While the capital that such undertakings inject into the economy is significant at first, “you’re effectively building something that lets people drive past the region,” he said. High-speed rail, on the other hand, creates local inflow and makes a region as large as the Inland Empire more manageable to entrepreneurs tired of “being stuck in commute for two hours because they work” in more dynamic economic zones closer to the water.

And on the green economy? “Focusing on just green products is missing the point,” Kemp said. “You cannot incentivize green creation, only its demand.”

Greening isn’t the product, but the process, he concludes. Firms that help companies operate more efficiently not only keep costs down, but diminish carbon footprint as well.

The solution, Kemp says, must include specific updates to education curriculum: “In the third and fourth grade when students are solving word problems, it’s time they start determining the costs” associated with more streamlined logistics.

The report — a joint effort of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico’s Commission of Human Rights — estimates that between 3,800 and 5,600 people have died trying to cross the border since 1994. The numbers of deaths have risen in recent years as the United States has funded more border enforcement, even though there are actually fewer people entering the United States now due to the economic downturn, and border arrests have declined.  An analysis completed this year of bodies recovered in the most dangerous sections of the border, for example, found that the risk of dying was 1.5 times higher in 2009 than in 2004, and 17 times higher than in 1998.

The report, Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border, blames the increase in deaths on aggressive U.S. enforcement policies initiated in the name of national security, and says that rather than create security, they’ve created a “humanitarian crisis.”

“Operation Gatekeeper intentionally forced undocumented immigrants to extreme environments that increased the likelihood of injury or death,” the report concludes.

“By any measure, Operation Gatekeeper is a failure,” Andrea Guerrero, Field and Policy Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties said in a statement released today. “It didn’t reduce unauthorized border crossings, the economy did. It has, however, cost thousands of people their lives. Instead of policies that foster fatalities, we need sensible, humane immigration and border policies that prioritize human life over death.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

For the first time in more than a year, the nation’s decimated housing market is showing a spark of life. But like everything else that’s been turned upside down by the credit crunch, it’s not clear whether foreclosed homes selling at fire-sale prices are an encouraging sign — or just a false hope of a rebound that’s still nowhere on the horizon.

In hard-hit Southern California, sales of existing houses shot up by 65 percent in September, compared with a year earlier — the biggest annual increase in two decades, according to the real-estate information provider MDA DataQuick. Sales rose the most in areas where foreclosures drove down prices, the data showed. In the San Fernando Valley, the sales jump was even higher — 82 percent, with foreclosure sales spurring the spike.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In Prince William County, Va., the heart of the exurbs of Washington, foreclosure sales are so hot they’ve set off a buying frenzy, with realtors who had long time on their hands busy once again. Foreclosure sales are also spiking in Atlanta, parts of Florida, Nevada and even in neighborhoods in Detroit, which barely experienced much of a housing boom to begin with.

The uptick in sales comes after a brutal 12 months for the housing market, which has been in free fall since the meltdown of subprime mortgages last year and the credit crunch that followed. In July, the nation’s inventory of unsold homes hit an all-time high of nearly 4.7 million, the National Assn. of Realtors said.

At the same time, home prices recorded their sharpest ever annual drop, falling 16.3 percent, according to the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Housing Index, a closely-watched measure. Meanwhile, foreclosures in the third quarter rose by 71 percent over the same period last year, RealtyTrac reported.

Given that dismal reality, any kind of movement in the housing market should be cause for celebration. But it’s way too early for champagne.

At L.A. Land, blogger Peter Viles of The Los Angeles Times took a closer look at the September sales figures for Southern California, and pointed out that sales of homes not in foreclosure actually fell — probably to their lowest levels in recent history. The Orange County Register blogger, Jon Lansner, concluded that sales last month were weakest in the county’s beach towns, which experienced far fewer foreclosures than in communities like Modesto or Stockton.

That helps explain why overall sales are up — while prices are still down. In the nine-county Bay Area, for example, the median sales price fell by 36 percent, while sales soared by 45 percent — leading The San Jose Mercury News to proclaim “Homes Sales Sizzle, Prices Fizzle.” That 82 percent sales jump in the San Fernando Valley, meanwhile, was accompanied by a 37 percent drop in median sales prices.

Even figures for new home sales released on Monday didn’t change the picture. The report from the U.S. Census Bureau showed a slight 2.7 percent increase in September sales, compared to August. But Calculated Risk noted that this marked the lowest September sales volume since 1981, and called the numbers “very weak.”

Foreclosed home in San Diego County, Calif. (Flickr: Sean Dreillinger)

Homebuyers are looking for Basement Bob-style real-estate bargains. And that’s about it.

“You’re going to see a lot of bottom-feeding right now,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poor’s. “The vultures are out. But they’re providing a needed ecological service. We’ve got to get rid of these diseased properties.”

Wyss put a Churchillian spin on all this, explaining that selling off foreclosed properties is “a necessary phase” to the start of any housing recovery — it’s the end of the beginning. Still, there are reasons for the lack of enthusiasm among housing experts looking at these foreclosure sales.

It’s not clear yet what kind of buyers are purchasing the homes, said Danilo Pelletiere, research director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group.

If a buyer is “an individual homeowner deciding to get off the fence” and buy, that’s a positive change, because there’s nothing worse for a neighborhood than a vacant, abandoned property. Plus, it means someone who might not have been able to afford a house in the past finally achieved a dream.

But if buyers comprise mostly investors and speculators, that could be a problem, Pelletiere said. It means the home might stay empty, which does little for the community.

And the property could keep falling into disrepair. Some speculators buy properties in bulk and hold them, which can artificially prop house prices up.

“We just don’t know who is buying the houses,” Pelletiere said. “The other problem is the degree to which the market still has yet to fall.”

In communities like Fairfax County, in Virginia, local governments are preparing to launch programs to buy up foreclosed properties and make them available to middle-income families looking for affordable housing. If the foreclosure market is hot, local authorities will be tempted to get in now and buy the homes.

Fairfax County alone is preparing to spend $10 million and buy up to 200 homes. But if the values of those homes drop, the local government will take a financial hit, Pelletiere said.

All this is a difficult balancing act for local governments, that have to figure out how to time the market correctly — something that has tripped up everyone from Donald Trump to amateur speculators who watch late-night infomercials.

It’s hard enough to do in ordinary times. With a credit crunch, it could become a guessing game. This means the first opening in years for affordable housing will be increasingly difficult to navigate, said Peter Tatian, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, who studies subprime lending and housing policy.

“This whole situation is unprecedented,” Tatian said. “There is an opportunity here to take advantage — in terms of affordable housing. It looks like people are finding a lot of bargains right now. But it’s also unfortunate that a whole lot of people had to suffer first. That makes it hard to say if the foreclosure sales are a good thing or a bad thing. We don’t know how much they are going to help in the long term.”

The sales spike in Prince William is particularly noteworthy, because prices rose to record highs here during the boom and fell just as hard. Prince William, along with Prince George’s County in Maryland, last spring racked up foreclosures at one of the fastest rates in the nation, according to a study by George Mason University’s School of Public Policy.

Lance Young, a real-estate investor in Northern Virginia, said he’s still shying away from buying foreclosures in Prince William: “It’s too hairy there,” he said, referring to the sharp swings in home prices.

It’s also difficult for investors to buy up the kind of five-bedroom, luxury homes that fill Prince William’s subdivisions and rent them out, because you can’t charge enough to cover the mortgage payment, Young said. He thinks prices still have far to fall, with more foreclosures looming.

“There’s still a lot of pain out there,” he said. “We’re only halfway through this thing.”

In recent months, Young has bought four foreclosed houses inside the Washington Beltway, far closer in to the District of Columbia than Prince William County. He flipped three, and lives in one.

It’s not like the old days of four or five years ago, when you could buy a house, demand any price, and quickly sell it, he said. Young gets his foreclosed houses at a steep bargain, meticulously rehabs them and then sells them for modest profits.

Everything’s different now, Young said. It’s not worth it to buy out in the exurbs like Prince William, because house values have fallen so far, they no longer compensate for the long commute.

Foreclosed houses are often in bad shape, making wading into that market an expensive venture. Young has viewed houses where the former owners let the taps run, locked the doors and left. By the time neighbors saw water pouring from the house, the hardwood floors were ruined.

All around the country, losses on foreclosures have been higher than lenders expected, S&P’s Wyss said. Banks have far more foreclosures than expected on their hands, and they have no experience at managing so many. It’s one reason why foreclosure prices are so low, and may not climb much.

There’s more to complicate the question of a rebound. The foreclosure sales spike happened in September, before the credit markets imploded. Buyers might have gotten loans in September, but they might not get them now. In addition, winter is coming, traditionally a slow time for real-estate sales.

The spikes in foreclosure sales could mean the end of the beginning, as Wyss says. But in a credit crisis in which banks just aren’t lending, and homes that haven’t been foreclosed on aren’t selling, it could also be true that the end of the beginning remains nowhere in sight.