Tom Scott on California City: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO3LUhFwx6k">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO3LUhFwx6k</a>
I never knew anything about this history. My great-grandfather moved from San Luis Potosi to Houston in the 1920s, and when that ended up not working out well, he taught himself stonemasonry and moved to California and built a house on land in the middle of absolute nowhere, which eventually became California City. I used to visit up there for a week every summer around Independence Day back in the 80s. Most of the family did not stay up there and ended up settling in and around East LA.<p>Interesting to think if this stupid idea had panned out. Would my family be wealthy land barons today just by virtue of settling in a place that boomed before it boomed? How many cities in the American west today are dominated by families that got lucky their desperate immigrant ancestor who had to settle in the frontier because they couldn't get work anywhere else happened to pick the right place a century before anyone could have known it was the right place?
Ironically, if it were to be built up, its currently amazing walkability would be completely ruined.<p>I mean look at it: you can go from any point A to any point B in a straight line, even if A and B are in the middle of distinct, unrelated culs-de-sac.
There's a fascinating podcast series about this place, which goes more into depth about its problem with land sale fraud: <a href="https://www.npr.org/podcasts/890392491/california-city" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.npr.org/podcasts/890392491/california-city</a>
This was interesting to read about and am not familiar with California City at all. Before clicking was thinking San Jose, CA may be the third largest by population so not what was expected.<p>Regardless it's pretty crazy how diverse CA geography is and how different north and south climates are
>To this day, the city remains California’s third largest by land area.<p>This is largely beside the point of this, but the lack of clarity in words such as "largest" and "biggest" in this space bugs me. LA is so much bigger than NYC (size), NYC is so much larger than LA (population). You'll get various guides saying just one is for size, but I've seen both given.<p>It's a minor issue, but it's annoying in language.