Skip to content
California City
A wide view from a desert hilltop over green scrub, yellow wildflowers and straight dirt roads to the low, spread-out houses of California City, with the snow-streaked southern Sierra Nevada along the horizon.

California City, CA · Mojave Desert · Kern County

Planned for 400,000. Kept by the desert.

A desert town of about 13,100 people, 110 miles by road from downtown Los Angeles, spread across 203.7 square miles of the western Mojave. Canyons, open riding, dark skies, and a street grid laid out for four hundred thousand.

Start exploring Open the grid map

Today in the desert

NWS

Loading the forecast

Wind
Riding

Forecast and conditions

California City from the Twin Buttes, looking west to the Sierra Nevada, March 2019. “Cal City Looking West” by Smm413, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; resized and converted to WebP.

Population
13,141
City limits
203.7 sq mi
Elevation
2,405 ft
To downtown LA
2 h 11 min
ZIP code
93505
Founded
1958

Checked . Every figure’s source is on California City at a glance.

What brings you out here?

Five reasons people look up California City, and where each one leads.

Interactive map

Every street they built, and what got built on them.

Platted for four hundred thousand across 203.7 square miles of Mojave. The streets went in. The buildings, mostly, did not. The orange marks are the buildings.

miles of platted street
1,332.7
of it with nothing within 100 m
84%
buildings in the whole city
5,941
Open the map

Simplified overview: nearby buildings share a mark at this scale. The map plots all 5,941 separately.

The story

What is California City known for?

In 1958 a developer named Nat Mendelsohn bought roughly eighty thousand acres of Mojave Desert in eastern Kern County and had a city planned on it for four hundred thousand residents, with a downtown, a man-made lake and two golf courses. The streets went in first. The residents never came in anything like those numbers.

When California City incorporated in 1965 its limits were drawn around the whole plat rather than the part people lived in, which is why a small town covers more land than any California city except Los Angeles and San Diego. What did get built is an ordinary and perfectly real desert town, with some of southern California’s best-known desert country all around it.

The streets that never got houses found a use of their own. Cal City, as riders and the city’s own OHV Department call it, runs them as an off-highway riding area, with its own permit and two signed trails. OHV riding in California City covers the permit, the map and the rules.

The full history, with sources
Satellite image of the built-up part of California City: blocks of houses around the green of Central Park and its lake, with bare desert crossed by straight roads around them. NASA's label reads Central Park; a scale bar shows one kilometre.
The town, around Central Park.
Satellite image of another part of California City: a web of straight and curving streets drawn across bare desert and low hills, with almost nothing built along them. NASA's label reads Roads; a scale bar shows one kilometre.
Elsewhere inside the city limits: streets with almost nothing on them.

Landsat 8, 18 October 2018. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Licence.

Around California City

Everything nearby

Most of what draws people to this corner of the Mojave is outside the city limits, and each place is run by someone different, under different rules. Drive times are by road from City Hall, from the getting here table.

A night sky packed with stars over the dark silhouette of eroded cliffs, with the band of the Milky Way rising on the left and the bright streaks of two meteors.

After dark

Stay for the sky.

The desert around California City is dark. Drive half an hour out of town and it is a different sky: where to go, how dark it really is, and how to plan a night out.

Stargazing near California City

Perseid meteors and the Milky Way over Red Rock Canyon, 13 August 2010. “Perseid and the Milky Way” by Ian Norman, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0; resized and converted to WebP.

Questions people ask

Short answers here. The full answer, with sources, is one click away.

California City in figures
Why is California City so empty?

Because it was planned for far more people than ever came. The answer, with sources

Why is California City so cheap?

Because there is far more land than anyone has wanted to build on. The answer, with sources

Is California City safe?

By the state’s own figures, violent crime runs higher than the California average and property crime lower. The answer, with sources

Is California City growing?

Not in its headline figure. The answer, with sources

Is my lot in California City worth anything?

It depends on the parcel, and there is no public price list. The answer, with sources