The history of California City

011958: a professor buys a piece of the Mojave

California City begins with one man and one very large transaction. In 1958 Nat Mendelsohn — a real-estate developer who had also been a sociology professor¹ — assembled a block of empty Mojave Desert land in the Fremont Valley of eastern Kern County, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles.² Sources put the purchase at 80,000 acres⁹ or 82,000 acres — roughly 128 square miles¹. Either way it was an area larger than most American cities, bought as raw desert with no water system, no employers and no road that mattered.

The timing was not eccentric. Post-war California was absorbing people at a rate that made almost any bet on suburban growth look conservative, and the state’s new freeways were pushing settlement further out every year. Mendelsohn’s wager was that the growth would not stop at the mountains, and that whoever owned the far side of them when it arrived would own the next Los Angeles.

He was wrong about the direction, but he was not wrong quietly. What he built instead of a city was one of the most effective land-sales operations in American history.

02The master plan: a downtown for a hundred thousand people

The plan was not a sketch. Mendelsohn commissioned the architecture firm Smith and Williams and the landscape architect Garrett Eckbo — a significant figure in mid-century American landscape design — to lay out the city.¹ They designed for 400,000 residents: a downtown core able to hold 80,000 to 100,000 of them, with satellite neighbourhoods for the rest.¹

At the centre went Central Park, with a 26-acre man-made lake, two golf courses and a new Holiday Inn.¹⁹ The lake is the tell: in a place that receives a few inches of rain a year, an artificial lake is not an amenity, it is an argument. It existed to be photographed and put in a brochure, and it worked.

Around the centre, the grid went in ahead of demand. Streets were graded, named, curbed in places, and drawn all the way out to the edges of the holding. That sequencing — infrastructure first, residents later, land sold in between — is the single decision that produced everything California City is now known for. The grid is still there. From the air, and from any satellite view, it reads as a full-sized American city; on the ground, most of it is graded dirt running between creosote bushes to a cul-de-sac with nothing on it.⁸

031965: incorporation, and the third-largest city in California

California City incorporated on 10 December 1965.¹ Incorporation fixed the boundaries around the whole of the platted area rather than around the part anyone lived in, and that is how a town of a few thousand people came to occupy 203.70 square miles — the third-largest municipal land area in California, behind only Los Angeles and San Diego.¹

The statistic is the one thing about California City that almost everyone has heard, and it is usually told as a curiosity. It is better understood as a balance sheet. A city with the land area of Los Angeles and the population of a small town has to maintain, police and eventually pave a road network built for a population that never arrived, on the tax base of about fifteen thousand people. Nearly every difficult decision the city has faced since — road maintenance, annexation, assessments, water — comes back to that ratio.

04Why the population never arrived

The plan assumed that people would follow the streets. They did not, for reasons that were visible in 1958 and remain true now.

• There was no reason to be there. A city needs employers. California City had no industry of its own and no port, rail hub or resource extraction to build one around. What work existed in the region was at Edwards Air Force Base and, later, the Mojave airfield — both real, both a drive away, neither large enough to fill four hundred thousand houses.
• Water. The Fremont Valley has no river. Everything depends on groundwater and imported supply, which sets a hard ceiling on growth that no amount of graded road changes.
• Distance. A hundred miles from Los Angeles across a mountain range was a long way in 1958 and is still a long way now.²
• Most buyers never intended to live there. This is the important one. The lots were sold as an investment — something to hold while the city arrived — and an investment does not need to be lived in. The sales operation did not require a single buyer to move to the desert in order to be enormously profitable.

05The land-sales machine, and the FTC

Mendelsohn’s company, Great Western Cities, turned lot sales into an industrial process. LAist’s investigation found that by 1970 it ran a real-estate training programme with around 3,000 salesmen and 24 sales offices around the world, and that it ultimately sold land to more than 73,000 people for hundreds of millions of dollars.²³ Buyers were shown the master plan, the lake and the graded streets, and sold a parcel in a city that was going to be built around them.

The sales practices attracted federal attention. Consumer-protection lawyers working with Ralph Nader examined the operation, and a 1971 report from that group described it in terms that made clear this was not routine real estate.² The Federal Trade Commission pursued the company, and in 1977 the case resolved: Great Western Cities was ordered to refund close to $4 million to more than 14,000 landowners — the largest consumer settlement the FTC had obtained to that point — and to invest $16 million in the infrastructure it had promised.¹⁴

It did not save the company. Great Western Cities went bankrupt in 1984, the same year Mendelsohn died.²

06Silver Saddle: the same land, sold again

The bankruptcy did not end the business; it changed hands. Thomas Maney, a former Great Western Cities employee, acquired vacant land and the Silver Saddle resort after the 1984 collapse and carried on selling desert parcels through it.²

From 2011 the operation took a new form. Buyers were sold shares in a “landbank”: a 1,000-acre block near California City, divided into 4,000 shares, marketed as the Galileo Project. According to LAist, more than 2,000 investors bought in at up to $30,000 a share, paid $41 a month in membership fees indefinitely, and were offered $2,000 for each new investor they brought in; the business took in more than $56 million between 2011 and 2019.² Sales were pitched heavily to Latino, Filipino and Chinese communities in California, frequently to people whose first language was not English.²⁴

In September 2019 the California Department of Business Oversight sued, alleging securities fraud and describing an operation that had collected more than $30 million through unlawful land sales, with Maney at its centre.⁴⁵ On 24 September 2019 the San Diego Superior Court entered a temporary restraining order halting further sales and freezing assets, and appointed Thomas W. McNamara as receiver over Silver Saddle Ranch & Club, Silver Saddle Commercial Development and the Galileo Commercial Property Owners Association; a preliminary injunction followed on 16 October 2019.⁶

What the receivership then established is the part that matters to anyone still holding one of these shares. The land was worth a small fraction of what had been paid for it. The receiver sold the Silver Saddle Ranch & Club itself for $2.1 million, closing in January 2021; a separate parcel went to a solar developer for about $4.1 million in June 2021; and the Galileo Project land — the 1,000 acres divided into 4,000 shares — was approved for sale at $900,000 in April 2022.⁶

The California Attorney General filed criminal charges in May 2022, and Maney pleaded guilty in the related criminal case on 12 March 2026.⁶ The receiver mailed final distribution cheques on 31 July 2026, returning 16.8 per cent of each approved claim;⁶ the state put the total at more than $7 million paid to nearly 3,000 people.⁷

07The town as it is now

California City is a real place with real residents, and it has been consistently ill-served by being written up as a curiosity. The 2020 census counted 14,973 people, up slightly from 14,120 in 2010.¹ The developed part — a few square miles in the west of the city’s 203 — is an ordinary small California desert town: schools, a supermarket, a hospital, churches, a city hall, Central Park and its lake.

Its economy leans on three things. The first is the desert itself. California City is a substantial off-highway-vehicle destination; the city’s own site describes more than 1,800 miles of combination-use city roads and dirt trails plus 33.5 miles of designated OHV trail, with routes running into the business district, and the surrounding public land adds the Jawbone and Dove Springs areas, the Rand Mountains and Red Rock Canyon State Park.¹² Riding weekends, and Thanksgiving week in particular, are when the town is busiest.

The second is the aerospace corridor. Edwards Air Force Base and the Mojave Air and Space Port are both within commuting distance, and California City Municipal Airport (FAA identifier L71) has a single 6,027-foot asphalt runway on 245 acres owned by the city — long enough that the field has a following among general aviation pilots.¹³

The third is the detention facility on the edge of town, and it is the most contested. The 2,560-bed prison was completed in the late 1990s by the private operator now called CoreCivic; the state leased it for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from 2013, moved the last inmates out in November 2023, and ended the lease in March 2024.¹⁰ In 2025 CoreCivic reopened it as an immigration detention facility. A California Department of Justice inspection in November 2025 reported serious problems with conditions and medical care there, and in July 2026 CoreCivic sold the facility to the US Department of Homeland Security as part of a larger transaction.¹⁰¹¹ For a town this size, a facility of that size is not a detail; it is a large share of the local employment and a permanent feature of local politics.

And the grid is still out there. Most of California City’s land area remains what it was in 1965: numbered streets, graded and named, running between empty parcels held by people scattered across the world who bought into a plan and are still waiting on it. That is the town’s defining fact, and sixty-eight years on it has proved far more durable than the city the plan described.