The third largest city in California is this huge desert ghost town

California's two largest cities by area, Los Angeles and San Diego, have beautiful beaches and boast more than a million residents.

California City, which sits in the tumbleweed and dust-filled Mojave desert, is the unexpected third.

Just 14,000 people live in the 203-square-mile city northeast of Los Angeles, as a video from YouTube personality Tom Scott reveals.

A ghostly patch of land, California City signifies the unrealistic ambitions of post-WWII development.

In the late 1940s, California experienced a population boom. Looking to get rich quick, many real estate developers looked West to build new suburbs. Clearing California City's land for development ironically led to more dust storms, and the suburbs never quite caught on.

"They built it, and no one came," Scott says in the video.

At the peak of postwar development in 1958, professor-turned-developer Nathan Mendelson bought 82,000 acres of Mojave land. Hoping it would turn into a rival city to LA, Mendelson planned more than 200 square miles of development.

California City's street names, Cadillac Boulevard, Volvo Drive, and Dodge Street, pay homage to car manufacturers. The city's center was supposed to be a 160-acre "Central Park," modeled after Manhattan's famous green space, according to CityLab.

Mendelson sold tens of thousands of plots, but few buyers actually developed their properties. Some who did develop stopped paying their property taxes, and the local government attempted to sell the land to make up for the lost revenue. The imitation "Central Park" was eventually completed and filled with a few golf courses.

By the 1970s, only around 7,000 people lived in the city.

Today, barely 14,000 people live in California City, most of them housed around Central Park next to unpaved cul-de-sacs. For comparison, around 1.3 million live in California's second largest city, San Diego.

Over 118,000 acres in California City are undeveloped, according to the Los Angeles Times. The city is one of the state's smallest by population.

The value of California City land, cursed by a 50-year drought, has stayed down.

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