Grand jury report tells story of Victorville's plunging fortunes - latimes.com

LA Times article on the hi-desert boom and bust community of Victorville, a
microcosm of the BK state of CA

Grand jury report tells story of Victorville's plunging fortunes - latimes.com

Opening intro to LA Times article:

 "Victorville hoped to strike it rich with a new hybrid gas and solar power plant near the old George Air Force Base, buying up homesteads for the site amid the High Desert's real estate boom. The city shelled out $375,000 alone to Chris Massey and his family in 2007 to buy a tiny house plopped on five desolate acres of scrub and Joshua trees — 10 times the property's assessed value."

"Today, the old Massey home sits abandoned, half-demolished by vandals, thieves and the merciless desert sun. The 500-megawatt power plant? It has yet to be built, even after a city agency spent $76 million. The failed project was just one of many financial disasters that had the city teetering on the brink of ruin after the collapse of the housing market in this patch of Mojave, when unemployment shot skyward and city tax revenues fell into the basement, an audit by a San Bernardino County grand jury found."

Comments: Victorville (VV) is just one of a slew of CA cites ready to follow Stockton into bankruptcy. City leaders say Victorville(VV) won't go 'Stockton' but they like all politicians are masking the real truth. VV was one of numerous SoCal hi-Desert/Inland Empire communities which were riding the crest of the great California RE boom pre-2007.  Desert property was soaring in value. Homes were listing for $400,000 and more for cheaply-built 2 story standard Lennar homes hastily put up in the most wretched scrub/cactus-brush forlorn tracts in hi-desert outskirts of such cities as Hesperia, Lancaster, Apple Valley, Phelan, Bear Valley, Adelanto, and some other faceless desert burgs located on the back sides of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Traverse Mountain Ranges of Southern California.

Large-scale housing tracts were springing up all over the vast expansive hi-desert scrubland like desert poppies, and cookie-cutter strip malls and retailer giants were blossoming all along Interstate 15.  I witnessed all this thru making 100 or so trips to VV, or passign thru it, on various courier deliveries from 2002-2007.   I saw vast RE contruction tracts springing up all over the Hi desert along Bear Valley Road and Highway 18: the entire CA hi-desert was riddled with realtors/homebuilders offices.

If you: ever have gone thru VV you can easily see that there simply is no real basis of wealth in VV no large-scale manufacturing plants (nor any type of industrial build-up period). It 's basically all RE tracts and shopping malls. The one large- scale jobs creating project, the proposed Inland Energy 500 MG Hybrid Gas/Solar Plant, is dead in the water for now.  Only thing VV has in the way of jobs generation is gov-run facilities such as the VV correctional facility, and a slew of welfare agencies and medical clinics which leech on government handouts.  BTW VV is no tourist draw, though it may snag a few travelers stopping for gas or a quick bit en route to Las Vegas along I-15.  It is flat, dry, searingly hot in summer, and now has 1000's of bargain-basement foreclosed and abandoned properties listed as low as $50,000 for ample 4 bdrm/2 baths on 1 acre lots, a far cry from the halcyon pre-2007 days of Hi-desert homes  pumped up with fake 300% to 500% valuations.

Repeat: VV was never a very attractive hi-desert draw to begin with. It is hot as hell in summer, with no scenic value and endless tacky urban-desert sprawl. Hoards of inner-city LA expats moved to VV to take advantage of cheaper  affordable hi-desert housing, and are now a huge welfare-collecting, gov-dependent class out in the hi-desert. Same thing occurred in Lancaster, Victorville's  hi-desert cousin 50 miles to the west.

 Victorville's civic leaders displayed absolute stupidity in financing municipal projects like drunken sailors pre-2008. The great financial meltdown of 2008 was the final torpedo shot which condemned VV into a permanently listing hulk slowly but inexorably sinking into a bottomless pit of a financial abyss