Welcome to California City: The Imaginary Metropolis
At the corner of 125th Street and Joshua Avenue, you’re more likely to run into a coyote than a commuter.
On 115th Street and Sequoia Boulevard, you won’t see many signs of civilization — let alone sequoias. Just miles of desert and distant mountains.
You wouldn’t know it at the intersection of 20th Street and Snake Avenue, but you’re standing inside the city with the third biggest footprint in California behind Los Angeles and San Diego.
Half a century ago, California City was advertised as the next great West Coast metropolis, a new retirement mecca that could rival Palm Springs.
But 45 years after its incorporation, only about 15,000 permanent residents live in California City, surrounded by a sprawling network of dirt roads that crisscrosses the desert, forming the street grid of an imaginary city.
In 1958, Nathan Mendelsohn, a Columbia University sociology professor and real estate developer, bought up 82,000 acres of the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and sold a dream.
“Buy a piece of the Golden State. You’ll be sitting pretty when you come to California City,” went the radio jingle, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Touting California City’s future as an urban hub and a retirement destination, Mendelsohn laid out roads and divided the desert into plots, many outfitted with water, electricity and gas lines.
Eventually buyers came to the planned city in Kern County, building homes on and around California City Boulevard, which today features the town’s Central Park, administrative buildings and de facto general store, a Rite Aid.
Many lots sold, but not many buyers actually moved in, leaving 7,000 unbuilt plots measuring an acre or less in the more developed “first community” and more than 15,000 unbuilt plots along the dirt roads of the sprawling “second community.”
“We could build for the next hundred years probably and not complete,” said Tom Weil, the community’s city manager.
A Retirement Community That Never Lived
Today, the seemingly endless dirt roads of the “second community” look like hiking trails from the ground — or works of environmental art from the air.
Other than a few pioneers who choose to live off the grid in the “second community,” the expansive network of unpaved paths is largely uninhabited.
“I don’t see the ‘second community’ developing en masse probably until past my lifetime,” said Weil.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, the history — and the future — of California City can be epitomized by the old real estate maxim “location, location, location.”
Situated about two hours away from Los Angeles — and 10 miles away from the nearest highway — California City was simply too far from populous areas to develop quickly, according to Weil.
“When California City was first envisioned, it was trying to mirror Palm Springs,” he explained. “The only problem is that Palm Springs is a lot closer to the population base as a whole, and it’s right there along a major highway.”
Though Weil now considers California City to be the “last commuter town on the Highway 14 chain,” it was originally marketed as a retirement community — a decision that had an unforeseen effect, according to public works director Mike Bevins.
“It delayed development for 20 years,” Bevins said. “It basically told people, ‘You’re not going to build here now, but when you retire in 20 years, this is where you’ll build.’
“But we found that when Grandma finally hit retirement age, her kids were now established in the Los Angeles area, and she didn’t want to move out to California City. So Grandma’s property didn’t get built on. It just got passed on as a legacy. We’re now looking at some second- and third-generation people who say, ‘Grandma had some property — I’d like to see where it is.’ ”
A City’s Limits
Marketing wasn’t the only thing that kept California City from thriving.
“You can’t build anything you want, anywhere you want. There are very real limits,” said Geoff Manaugh, an architecture writer and teacher at the University of Southern California and Columbia University.
With its desert environment and distant location, California City had little hope of capturing the “edenic feel of California,” said Manaugh, who has written about California City on his website, BLDG BLOG.
“I think it was miscalculation of the appeal that LA has. [Los Angeles] is a kind of a mountain city right on the coast — it has the beach, it has a certain natural beauty,” said Manaugh, who last year led a walking tour through the desert community.
“Building something that huge in the middle of nowhere was a miscalculation of why people move to California in the first place.”
With Los Angeles booming thanks to the movie and aerospace industries, California City couldn’t compete — especially when it came to jobs.
“You can understand the optimism that the developers had when they tried to create California City, but the conditions were not right.”
California Dreaming
Having lived in California City since the mid-1980s, Weil has watched its population grow from 2,500 to roughly 15,000. And he’s encouraged by the potential for future development.
Touting California City’s park system and golf courses, a new elementary school and talk of a community college, plans for high-speed rail access and highway connectivity, new jobs at nearby Edwards Air Force Base and a soon-to-open gold mine and career opportunities at a borax mine and a prison, Weil is nothing if not a cheerleader for his desert community.
“You have to acquire a taste for the desert,” he said. “Brown has to become your favorite color.”
Weil hopes to see California City’s population double over the next 25 years — and he isn’t the only one keeping the dream alive.
“It’s certainly not a ghost town,” said Mike Riding, a California City-based real estate broker for Coldwell Banker. “There’s no other place outside of Los Angeles that has lots developed and subdivided that are ready to go.”
Despite seeing a high number of foreclosures during the subprime mortgage crises, Riding says the real estate market is now “stable” and could one day thrive because of the land available for development in Southern California.
“It’s an interesting place and it’s got a tremendous potential for growth,” he told AOL News. “If young people ever want to own a home, they can’t do it in Los Angeles because they cost $500,000 or $600,000.”
By comparison, homes in California City sell for between $50,000 and $90,000, and empty lots equipped with water, power and gas lines sell for up to $10,000.
“This has been the whole history of Southern California. This is ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ out here — this is the last frontier. Eventually, people will have to move here if they want to own a home.”
Despite Weil’s and Riding’s boosterism, Manaugh isn’t optimistic when it comes to California City.
“I don’t see any immediate boom possible for California City, especially in today’s economy when exactly those sorts of places were hit the worst by the recession.”
That said, he is encouraged to see the largely uninhabited “second community” being appropriated by off-road vehicle enthusiasts and others with a trailblazing attitude who have set up homes off the grid, living off their own water and power.
For them, California City might be a land of opportunity. But for Manaugh, it’s a rare example of an American ruin.
“It’s precisely because it didn’t work that it revealed something we wouldn’t normally see,” Manaugh said.
“This is what everything could have been — this is what could have happened to your community, but your community worked.”