California’s third largest city is mostly empty roads

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Miles and miles of unpaved roads are carved into the eastern half of California City, intersecting and folding into themselves only to bottom out into empty cul de sacs. Even though there are no houses in sight, the roads are marked with street signs — with names like Lincoln Boulevard, Rutgers Road and Aristotle Drive — that stand among the prickly creosote bushes.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adAside from the dusty roads and the telephone poles, the only interruptions to the landscape are old signs advertising land for sale. Some have fallen off of their wooden posts and lie flat on the sand. A sign welcomes visitors to the Mojave Desert town of California City, Calif., approximately 100 miles (160 km) north of Los Angeles, Oct. 1, 2021.ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty ImagesThis vacant neighborhood was meant to be the heart of one of the most ambitious cities ever imagined, a master-planned community designed to house hundreds of thousands and attract tourists from around the country. Like its roads, the story of how California City turned from an architectural vision into a 13,000-person desert outpost is long and winding, punctuated by big dreams, corporate missteps and federal investigations, culminating in one of the biggest FTC payouts of the 20th century.In 2023, as tech billionaires prepare to build a utopian city in Solano County, California City remains a reminder of just how wide the gulf between design and execution can be.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adTo this day, the city remains California’s third largest by land area. Its sprawling footprint on the map attests to the gulf between ambitions and outcomes. Houses, businesses and paved roads cluster around the western half of town, which sits over a deep aquifer of water, leaving the city’s eastern side — originally planned as the center of the city — almost completely empty. The anti-Los Angeles“For lack of a better description, [developers] really understood and pitched California City as an alternative and potentially competing city with Los Angeles,” Shannon Starkey told SFGATE. Starkey is an associate professor of architecture at University of San Diego and has spent years researching the city.Piecemeal development was responsible for Los Angeles’ traffic problems, California City’s developers thought. They believed that LA, which appeared to be pressing against its population ceiling, was unprepared for California’s postwar population boom. New communities would need to pick up the slack. California City was designed to fit the bill: a sprawling, self-sufficient city in the desert. In the original plan, Starkey said, the city was projected to hold 400,000 people.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adOn Oct. 18, 2023, the lake in the heart of California City’s Central Park was an algae green.Timothy Karoff/SFGATEThe city was officially born in 1958, when an ambitious developer named Nat Mendelsohn and his California City Development Company purchased approximately 80,000 acres of land in the Kern County desert. Mendelsohn was the city’s chief dreamer, salesperson and evangelist. Mendelsohn was no stranger to designing communities. Prior to California City, he developed the Arlanza Village neighborhood in Riverside. He later helped subdivide the desert community Hesperia outside LA. But California City was Mendelsohn’s first (and last) project of such an ambitious scope. Kathryn Efford-Floyd worked for Mendelsohn’s company as a sales manager in the 1960s, and later as a public relations manager in the ’70s. She described him as a “very personable salesman type, very smooth.”An unpaved road on California City’s undeveloped eastern side on Oct. 18, 2023.Timothy Karoff/SFGATEAdvertisementArticle continues below this adAccording to Starkey, the original plan for California City took about a year to design, including details as specific as the types of trees in the park and the colors of road signs. The city’s core would be a downtown center that would accommodate 80,000 to 100,000 people, while six satellite suburbs would each hold between 30,000 to 50,000 residents. The city would have a golf course and a park with an artificial lake — two features that actually came to fruition. A 1961 issue of United Home Services Club gushed about Mendelsohn: “Not since Pierre L’Enfant layed out the original design for Washington, DC, has there been such complete understanding of the need to look into the future and make a city that will still be well planned 50 years later.” Mendelsohn’s company first spent millions of dollars to find water. While the heart of the city was originally meant to land on the city’s eastern side, the aquifer was under the western side. In this western hub, which later developed into California City’s population center, the company paved roads and built out water infrastructure for housing. The 20-acre lake in Central Park, the community’s recreational complex, in California City, Calif., 1970.Bill Johnson/Denver Post/Getty ImagesAdvertisementArticle continues below this adPerhaps its greatest achievement was the construction of California City’s Central Park, complete with an artificial lake and waterfall next to soft, green grass that grew in the desert. “It was green and fabulous and it was a jewel in the desert,” Pat Gorden, the first president of East Kern Historical Museum Society, told SFGATE. “The only one in the valley.” For the park’s opening, Mendelsohn flew over the lake in a helicopter and dropped 10 gallons of water from New York City’s Central Park in a symbolic gesture. Central Park was a proof of concept for California City: evidence that with enough money and effort, it was possible to reshape the desert into a green paradise.Absolute expectationsThe town was incorporated in 1965 with a population that hovered around 600. According to Gorden, who moved to California City early in the decade, nearly everybody gathered in the newly built elementary school, which hadn’t yet opened, for a big dance. Mendelsohn and California’s lieutenant governor took turns sharing remarks. The mood in the 1960s, Gorden said, was one of “absolute expectations.”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adBut behind the pomp, California City’s incorporation was also a sly tactical move, Starkey said. By incorporating California City as a community services district, Mendelsohn’s company foisted fiscal responsibility for the city’s maintenance onto the city’s government. The newly formed city also absorbed the company’s debts. At the moment of its incorporation, California City was $7.5 million in the hole.“Miles Of Raw Land Waiting For People; Area in background is to become an 80-acre lake, fed by several wells.” March 22, 1970, Apr. 17, 1970.Bill Johnson/Denver Post via Getty ImagesEfford-Floyd, who arrived around 1970 to work in the California City Development Company’s offices, remembers the town fondly. “It was small-town atmosphere,” she said. Her children did archery, played softball and swam in the town’s pool. She never worried about crime.While Mendelsohn’s development company intended California City to be a city, it was also a business venture. The company’s business model involved purchasing the land for cheap, developing it with parks and infrastructure and then selling lots and homes to potential residents.AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“‘Land rush’ seen as first lot sales start to pour in,” a 1958 newspaper advert read. “California City has a golden destiny built into it,” read another ad, posted in the Los Angeles Times. “Those who secure lots in California City now stand to profit.”But a land rush never quite materialized. “We always thought that this next one is the one that we’re gonna have and we’re gonna grow,” Gorden said. “And we didn’t. It’s just been that way.”She compared the population’s ebbs and flows to “a wave going in and out of the ocean.”AdvertisementArticle continues below this ad“I am scared to death for our future dividends”In California City’s Senior Citizens Center, a framed puzzle from 2010 commemorates the 45th anniversary of the city’s incorporation.Timothy Karoff/SFGATEBuilding a city is expensive business. Especially when that city sits in the middle of the desert. Mendelsohn often traveled to New York to court investors to keep the venture afloat. He seemed to have found a deep well of funding in William “Billy” White, Jr., president of Great Western United. Mendelsohn sold a majority interest in his company to White, who folded California City Development Company into his newly formed and expanded Great Western Cities company.“He thought it was going to be a great opportunity to help put money into the city,” Gorden explained, but White fired Mendelsohn as president “at the first opportunity so he could do things his way.” AdvertisementArticle continues below this adMendelsohn, who remained a shareholder after he was removed as president, addressed Great Western’s shareholders at a meeting. “White delegates on paper, but intrudes on…

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