sit down, kids, i’m gonna tell you a fucking story about california city.
imagine it’s the 1960s. we’re gonna fucking go to SPACE and there’s hella people who wanna OWN LAND because if you own land then you’re rich and shit. everybody wants to own land in the 1960s. owning land is like the iPhone of the 1960s, and nat mendelsohn knows it.
“yo,” nat says to himself one day, “nobody lives in the mojave desert and that shit’s basically like FREE LAND. what if i just buy the mojave desert for real cheap and sell it to people so they can FULFILL THE AMERICAN DREAM and OWN SOME LAND.”
so he bought the mojave desert and did exactly that.
(historical accuracy note: nat did not buy the entire mojave desert. he did buy a huge fucking chunk of it, though, so the statement ‘he bought the mojave desert’ is accurate, if slightly misleading.)
once nat had bought the mojave desert, he split it up into a bunch of lots and drew some roads and put in some street signs so it looked like the first five minutes of when you’re playing the sims and you haven’t actually built any buildings yet but you’re trying to plan out where the fuck your house is gonna go and where your shitty neighbors are gonna go.
with like ¼th of a city planned, nat then had huge planefuls of people flown in so he could show him all the streets and shit he’d marked out for his city and hopefully sell them a piece of this city. they were gonna have a huge park and swimming pools and white picket fences and it was gonna be AWESOME.
he made BOATFULS OF MONEY selling these plots of land. everyone fucking owned a california city plot. my own great-grandmother owned a california city plot. it was gonna be BIGGER THAN LOS ANGELES and they could all build cute lil cookie cutter 1960s houses and plant lawns and have backyard barbecues with the fam. california city was gonna be POPPIN’, but everyone had to move there first.
this is where nat’s choice of making a city in the middle of the desert was REALLY FUCKING STUPID.
kids, if you’ve never been to a desert then it’s gonna be impossible to explain why moving to the middle of the mojave desert is a stupid fucking plan. instead, i’ll just tell you this: california city is located just 65 miles from DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, which is the hottest place on the face of the earth. california city isn’t much cooler than death valley, let me tell you, and even the native los angeles residents who now owned california city plots were kinda rethinking moving to the middle of bumfuck nowhere to be part of this poppin’ new california city.
“fam,” those people said to their squad on the telephone because it’s the 1960s and group chat hasn’t been invented yet, “i dunno about this california city thing. yeah, my boy nat says it’s gonna be LIT but also it’s in the mojave desert and i’m not sure if he mean lit like ‘turned up’ or lit like ‘your ass is gonna be lit on fire if you try to sit down in this hundred degree heat.’ maybe we should just move to burbank. at least they have movie stars and shit plus i don’t gotta build a whole fucking house.”
so nobody but like three people moved into california city.
(historical accuracy note: it was like three hundred people, but that makes it sound impressive for those of you that come from places where three hundred people living in bumfuck nowhere is actually a lot of people living in bumfuck nowhere so please just imagine three people, by themselves, in the desert. way more accurate representation of how many people actually showed up versus were supposed to show up.)
those three people sure built a functional, working city, though. they got an AIRPORT! they got a BASEBALL TEAM! they got the EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE nearby, so everyone’s got jobs! all the borax for those middle school kids that are selling slime probably comes from the BORAX MINE in california city! and by golly they got their fucking park.
it’s a cool place, aside from the fact that it always feels like you’re being cooked alive in an oven except for in the winter when it’s fucking freezing because deserts want to kill you no matter what season it is.
and that’s the story of why california’s third largest city has less than fifteen thousand people living in it.
TL;DR: local man ran successful kickstarter for a planned city but found out if you don’t actually build it, they ain’t gonna come.
