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This is undoubtedly someone's sick idea of a joke. California is, for the most part, a DESERT. Land there has no value unless it has water, or has water available!

Doesn't matter how much of it you cover over with houses ~

The agriculturally productive areas thrive with water imported from mountainous areas where snow accumulates and melts.

California is, for the most part, a DESERT.

I'm a fifth generation CA native and know my very large Golden State -- the only states bigger are Alaska and Texas -- pretty well. It's amazing what some people consider "desert." I heard radio clowns John & Ken (KFI) once describe Cholame, where James Dean was killed in an auto wreck, as "out in the desert." Right -- rolling hills with creeks, oak trees, grazing land, and dry-farmed fields of livestock feed. If that's a desert, I'd hate to know what they thought Lancaster and out Edward AFB way is. Super desert???

I'd say maybe 25 percent of CA is actually desert -- you could irrigate those areas it 'til the cows come home and still not grow much of anything but scrub. The great, flat, and (when not irrigated) bone-dry San Joaquin Valley isn't a desert, it's a dried-up ancient inland seabed, which is why its soil is so fertile that it feeds (or did until environmentalists put a stupid tiny fish higher on the food chain than humans and stopped irrigation for farmers) most of the U.S.

It's such a myth that "Southern California is really one big desert!" Wrongo. Even before water was brought in, most of Los Angeles proper and the San Fernando Valley, and the areas from LA down to San Pedro and on down through Orange County all the way down to San Diego, are so UN desert that people settled to live here, farm, ranch, and prosper LONG before water was shipped in.

I've read enough California history and seen enough old photos, and talked to enough old-timers who remember life here in the 1800s, to know better than to believe the ol' "California is mostly desert!" poppycock.

RE my post #21: Make that, talked to enough old timers who remembered life in the 1800s, or who were one generation from parents who remembered because they were here. My own great-great grandfather and great-great uncles came from Michigan in the late 1800s and travelled all up and down California, on foot, to find the best place to grow flower seed crops, and ended up in Santa Ana (Orange County, near Disneyland). This was LONG BEFORE 1913, when the Mulholland's Los Angeles Aquaduct was completed. That water wasn't to irrigate "the desert," it was to support farmers and a growing population.

Just so y'all know -- when you hear somebody say "Oh, California (and/or Southern California) was all desert before the aquaduct!" it's a sure sign they don't know what they're talking about.