About this site

Who runs it

californiacity.com is owned and run by a private individual. It is not a nonprofit, and it speaks for nobody but itself. It is not staffed, so replies are not instant, but corrections are acted on.

It is a commercial site in intent: the plan is that some sections eventually carry advertising or referrals, in areas like land services and lodging. Nothing of the kind runs today. When it does, it will be labelled where it appears, and it will not be allowed to decide what the reference pages say. Any page that carries a commercial relationship will say so on the page.

What it is for

California City is written about constantly and researched rarely. It turns up as a drone video, a “creepiest places in America” listicle, or a paragraph of the same four facts recycled from the same Wikipedia article. Very little of it is useful to the people who actually have a stake here: the residents, the tens of thousands of absentee lot owners, the riders, and the people who were sold something.

So the aim is a reference site rather than a blog. Pages that stay accurate and get updated, sources you can check, and tools that answer a question rather than a search engine.

How it is edited

• Sourced or not stated. Dates, figures and names carry a citation to something you can open. Where sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking the tidier number.
• Allegations stay allegations. Until a court or a defendant resolves a matter, it is described as what was alleged, by whom, and when.
• Unfinished is labelled unfinished. Sections still being written say so in the navigation and at the top of the page. There is no filler.
• No republishing of people’s records. The old municipal site published thousands of daily police reports naming people who had been arrested, and photo galleries of named residents. Those are never republished and their URLs return 410 Gone. That costs this site real search traffic and it is not up for reconsideration.
• Corrections are visible. A page that is materially corrected carries its review date; if we got something wrong, the fix is not quiet.

The old city website

From roughly 2005 until 2015 this domain carried the City of California City’s website. This site does not republish those pages or documents. Old links to them land on a page that explains this and points to the Internet Archive’s captures.

If you hold rights in something here and want it handled differently, write and it will be dealt with promptly.

Contact

Corrections, additions, takedown requests and anything else: hello@californiacity.com. Corrections that come with a source get handled fastest.