Stay Out Of California City

I can speak of this town as I used to work had a address in this town and don't see it ever become anything.
California City is an exurb, a town without a centre, a place without place: only an aggregation of affluent-ish detached lots. A city, population 13,223. Nearby there’s a prison, an air force base, a Hyundai testing facility and a Boron mine (yea I worked there too). Other sources of employment include Mojave Air and Space Port.
So we came to California City on the trail of a 1950s visionary, sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn, who had planned to build a new Los Angeles in 80,000 acres of desert.
“To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed areas of the city. Satellite photos show how it is California’s 3rd largest geographic city, 34th largest in the US.” [Wikipedia]
It's like that other failed attempt at a community in the middle of nowhere called California Pines


All you have to do is drive to one end of town down empty palm-lined boulevards, then took a turn left down a dirt road, past the last few houses. The properties were newish builds, probably part of the city’s growth in the early mid 2000s. Empty lot, empty lot, house. Empty lot, another house. Then just empty lots, for miles.
City meaning code enforcement so not off grid or anything outlandish...
There were signs that once something had been about to start here: poles with street names; standpipes, for water; the way the dirt tracks were edged with desert brush like so many overgrown suburban lavender bushes. Even a realtor’s sign, swinging.
But we weren’t the first people there. This lost utopia was already occupied by a hundred sun-bleached old couches and other suburban detritus, living rooms somehow tossed out here before anyone had ever had the chance to move in.
If this place was haunted by anything it was by the fantasy of what we wanted to see there, the stories we wanted to spin. In this dead-eyed mood I couldn’t swallow this suburban ghost-hunt, didn’t want
Driving around the grid, as grids do, kept repeating. Another abandoned couch, another kilometre of dirt track.
The story of California City I’d been sold was one of nostalgia for California optimism and the Space Age, for a 1950s modernism that believed cities could be planned and rationalised and perfected. We know that they can’t, now, but there’s supposed to be a kind of poignancy at the generations before us who believed in the future
Nat Mendelsohn’s dream of a desert Los Angeles is just that a dream.