"Allowing warehouses to be built in residential neighborhoods would have an impact on our homes, our parks and our children."
That was Rialto resident Brenda Parker, speaking at the January 28, 2025 city council meeting where the council enacted an emergency 45-day moratorium on new warehouse approvals. The same night, the council upheld a resident appeal and denied a warehouse project proposed for Locust Avenue and West Coast Boulevard, right next to homes in North Rialto. It felt like a turning point. A year later, California has its own statewide version of what Rialto tried to do locally, and it took effect on January 1, 2026. But the state law comes with an exemption clause that swallows a meaningful share of what's already moving through Rialto's pipeline, and almost nobody shopping for a house near the city's industrial corridor is asking about it yet.
If you're looking at a home anywhere near Rialto's warehouse zones, the question that matters isn't how close the nearest facility sits. It's whether the project down the street was filed before or after a date that passed nearly two years ago.
A Moratorium Bought Time, Not Protection
Rialto's moratorium, adopted under emergency Ordinance 1697, was never meant to be permanent. It paused new warehouse approvals for 45 days, then got extended on February 25, 2025 for six more months, pushing the expiration to August 26, 2025. It also came with built-in gaps: projects already approved by the council or planning commission were untouched, anything more than 500 feet from a home, school, church, or park was untouched, and any warehouse or storage building under 100,000 square feet was exempt outright. Principal planner Daniel Casey described the pause as time for the city to review its own zoning rules and weigh how they lined up with the new state law working its way through Sacramento.
That state law is Assembly Bill 98, and it's now the floor Rialto has to build on, not a substitute for local policy. The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, which pushed hard for the moratorium, has said as much directly. Executive director Ana Gonzalez has argued the city has a responsibility to go beyond what AB 98 requires, not treat it as the finish line.
The Rule That Was Supposed to Replace Local Politics
AB 98, signed by Governor Newsom in September 2024, sets design standards for new or expanded logistics facilities anywhere within 900 feet of what the law calls a "sensitive receptor": a home, a school, a daycare, a public park or playground used by children, a nursing home or hospice, or a hospital. Rialto sits inside the law's defined Warehouse Concentration Region, along with Chino, Colton, Fontana, Jurupa Valley, Moreno Valley, Ontario, Perris, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands, Riverside, and San Bernardino, a designation that gave these specific cities an earlier compliance deadline than the rest of the state for updating their truck-route planning.
Inside that 900-foot radius, new projects have to keep loading bays hundreds of feet back from the nearest home, screen themselves with landscaped buffers, limit truck idling, and route heavy trucks away from residential streets. On paper, it reads like the kind of protection Brenda Parker was asking for at that January meeting.
The Cutoff Date That Decides Whether Any of This Applies to You
Here's the part that gets skipped in most summaries of the law. AB 98 does not apply to logistics projects that had already started the local entitlement process before September 30, 2024, as long as construction begins within five years of getting approved. It also doesn't apply to any project that already had local approval before the law's own effective date of January 1, 2025.
That's not a narrow exception. It's a two-and-a-half-month gap between when the bill passed and when its cutoff kicked in, plus another three months before it formally took effect, during which any warehouse application already in Rialto's system could lock in its exemption regardless of how close it eventually lands to an existing home.
Look at the city's own current projects list and you can see what that means in practice. A 664,859-square-foot warehouse proposed for the southwest corner of Locust Avenue and Lowell Street, inside the Rialto Airport Specific Plan, went before the city council for a public hearing on January 27, 2026. Its case file numbers, tied to a tentative parcel map application, date back to 2023, a full year before AB 98's cutoff. Whether that specific project ultimately falls under the new buffer standards or sails past them under the grandfather clause isn't something a buyer can assume either way just because the calendar now reads 2026. It has to be checked project by project.
Two Buyers, Two Buffers: Why Zoning Status Changes the Math
Even for projects that do fall under AB 98, the buffer isn't one fixed number. It depends on what the parcel was zoned before the application was filed.
| Site's zoning status | Minimum loading bay setback | Minimum landscape buffer |
|---|---|---|
| Already zoned industrial | 300 feet from the nearest sensitive receptor | 50 feet |
| Not zoned industrial, or needs a rezone | 500 feet from the nearest sensitive receptor | 100 feet |
That gap matters more in Rialto than it might elsewhere, because not every proposed warehouse site here started out zoned for industrial use. One pending application would redevelop a site on Foothill Boulevard near Larch Avenue, land currently designated Residential-High Density under the Foothill Boulevard Specific Plan, into an industrial building. If that project proceeds and falls under AB 98's standards, it lands in the wider 500-foot, 100-foot tier because it needs a rezone, not the tighter 300-foot tier that applies where the land was already zoned for this use. Two homes sitting the exact same distance from two different warehouses could end up with very different required buffers, purely based on a zoning designation that has nothing to do with the house itself.
A Law Still Being Rewritten While You're Reading This
AB 98 also isn't finished changing. On October 3, 2025, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 415, which rewrote several of the original bill's rougher edges. It softened the loading dock orientation requirement from facing the opposite side of the building away from homes to simply facing away from them, to the extent feasible. It clarified that a single dedicated truck lane counts as a separate truck entrance, even for projects with multiple buildings, instead of requiring one per building. It also expanded which access roads qualify and clarified what counts inside a buffer area, including parking and pedestrian walkways.
None of that is settled history. SB 415 is less than a year old, and even AB 98's own compliance deadlines are proving hard to hit: reporting from a February 2026 gathering of the Freight Communities Action Coalition in Moreno Valley found some Inland Empire cities, Rialto's neighbors in the same Warehouse Concentration Region, were still catching up on the truck-route mapping the law was supposed to have in place by January 1, 2026. A law that was already behind schedule seven weeks after taking effect is not one you can take at face value from a search you ran this morning.
What to Actually Ask Before You Write an Offer
If a home you're considering sits within a quarter mile of Rialto's industrial corridor, here's what actually tells you something:
- Pull up the city's current projects list and check for anything pending within 900 feet of the address, not just what's already built.
- Ask when that project's application was originally filed. Case numbers starting with 2023 or earlier are a signal, not a guarantee, that it may predate the cutoff.
- Ask whether the parcel was zoned industrial before the application, or whether it required a rezone, since that determines which buffer tier applies.
- Ask whether the buffer wall or landscaped berm has actually been built yet, since a required buffer on paper and a finished buffer on the ground are not the same thing during the months a project is under construction.
- Check whether the project has already been the subject of a council vote or resident appeal, the way the Locust Avenue and West Coast Boulevard project and the separate Vineyard Avenue Warehouse Project both were, since Rialto's council has shown it's willing to deny projects that meet the state's minimum standards if local opposition is strong enough.
If You're Selling Near the Corridor
For sellers, the honest move is the same one that protects buyers: know the exemption status of anything pending nearby before a buyer's agent finds it first. CCAEJ has been pushing Rialto to adopt a formal "good neighbor policy," the kind of local agreement that goes beyond AB 98's floor with commitments like solar requirements or direct community benefit terms. If a property near yours already has one of those negotiated, that's worth mentioning. If it doesn't, silence isn't a strategy once a buyer starts asking the questions above.
FAQ
Does AB 98 apply to warehouses that are already built near my home? No. The law only applies to new or expanded logistics developments going through entitlement now, not to existing operating facilities.
What exactly counts as a "sensitive receptor" under the law? Homes, schools from preschool through 12th grade, daycares, publicly owned parks and playgrounds used by children, nursing homes and hospices, and hospitals.
Is Rialto's warehouse moratorium still in effect? No. Ordinance 1697 expired on August 26, 2025. AB 98 and its amendment, SB 415, are now the operative rules for new projects, alongside whatever the city adopts locally on top of them.
How do I find out if a specific project predates the cutoff? Start with the city's current projects page, then look at the case file numbers and filing dates on any pending application. A planner or land use attorney can confirm the exact entitlement timeline for a specific parcel.
Rialto's industrial corridor isn't going away, and neither is the law meant to manage how close it can grow to the next subdivision. What changes house by house is whether that law actually reaches the project in question. That's not a question a listing sheet answers. If you're weighing a home near Rialto's warehouse zones, or thinking about selling one, Salem Realty Group can walk through the pending projects and zoning history around a specific address before you make a decision. Talk with Jose, request a free consultation, and get the answer before it shows up in escrow instead of before your offer.
