She explained that most people in Cal City, as locals call it, work at the correctional center outside town, the borax mine nearby, or a Hyundai-KIA proving ground for testing cars.

I had a class in Economic Geography. Cities grow where there are resources to support them. Most major cities, like New York, San Francisco and L.A., sprout up and boom due to natural ports that can be easily developed. A river meets the ocean or there is some sort of bay or quirk of the coastline. It takes little or nothing to start using it as a port. Traffic begets development.

This is why where we lay infrastructure like highways and rail lines can be such a heated debate. When cars began, the world had dirt and cobblestone streets. This was not sufficient. Proper roads developed.

During The Great Depression, people fled the Dust Bowl and arrived in California to start over. The route they traveled became the famed Route 66. The exodus birthed small towns along the way.

When interstates became the new norm, the towns along Route 66 mostly died. The traffic was diverted from roads that ran through the middle of town to roads that went around the town.

I quoted the snippet above because there is a borax mine -- a natural resource that fosters job creation -- and a correctional center. Prisons tend to be built in the middle of nowhere. No one wants to live near them. They do attract some development because they provide jobs. These are often federal or state government jobs. They can pay well, be secure and come with good benefits. They are worth putting up with some inconvenience.

Lots of good federal and state jobs involve some degree of burden. Military jobs, jobs at nuclear plants and so on can be a burden for the person who holds the job. When I was a military wife, military spouses had something like a 30% unemployment rate compared to about 6% or so for the general population. Locals don't want to hire military spouses because they know you are going to move again when the military member gets assigned elsewhere.

But the other reason unemployment is so high for military members is because it is a job with excellent benefits. The entire family has access to good medical care, most of it outright free. You just show your ID card to access it.

Military benefits have eroded in recent decades. They are making more of an effort to charge the insurance of employed spouses and a lot of small things have gone away. But it is still a situation where it is possible to make the traditional nuclear family with one breadwinner and one homemaker work. Money will be tight, but lack of savings is not a problem. If you stay in 20 years or more, you will get a retirement check for life and continue to get access to medical benefits and other benefits.

Wow, I seem to be rambling. My point is that sprawling cities don't just randomly pop up. They start with geographic resources, usually including waterways because water is critical for life and waterways provide transportation options. Once established, they may have an accumulation of intellectual capital, material capital, etc that grows them further.

Hershey, PA was laid out from scratch. But it was laid out from scratch by the Hershey company. It was a company town. They built their new factory there and built housing for their employees. It was naturally seeded in this way and had no problem attracting other businesses to serve the population. It is technically an unincorporated community, but (according to Wikipedia) it has more than 14k residents and has amenities like a local library.

There has to be a reason to move there. This is why these sorts of schemes so consistently fail. There is no real raison d'etre.