Nothing But Carrots And Onions

Apparently, I'm the last man in the Antelope Valley to have heard that from 2008 to 2028, the Tejon Ranch Corporation wants to build a 70,000 resident city to the east and north of Quail Lake. Tejon Ranch is currently the owner of the largest contiguous plot of land that is privately owned in California and this would be on the (relatively) small portion of that land that is in Los Angeles County. The community would be about equidistant from Santa Clarita, Lancaster, and Stinking Bakersfield, at the western apex of the geographic "triangle" formed by the San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountain ranges that is the Antelope Valley.

Yes, there are apparently a large number of environmental activist groups that want to stop this from happening. While I welcome the idea of 70,000 new clients in the area to service, I also hope that they preserve the absolutely gorgeous Tejon Pass and the prettier natural areas of that part of their holdings. But it seems like everyone in the area has heard of this before I finally got around to reading about it in California Lawyer magazine today.

Right now, there's nothing but carrot and onion farms, a gravel quarry, and pumping stations for the California Aqueduct out there. But in twenty years, there will be an entire city of Centennial, California and my remarks here will sound as antiquated as the old-timers who say that they can remember when Anaheim used to be nothing but orange groves and Irvine was a bunch of bean fields.