Golden City Recycled

6th November 2023

Dear Governor Newsom,

In my letter of October 31st 2023 I detailed my idea to build a homeless rehabilitation center in California City one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. I called this my Golden City Proposal and touched on the abundance of zoned land to use for this purpose.

Now I would like to make mention of the fact that there are more reasons that California city is ideal for this action. The primary employer in California city is a prison, it’s closer to the border with Nevada, and it’s still not too far from LA.

The “Not in My Backyard” people fight against the placement of homeless shelters and halfway homes in their neighborhoods. Well, a prison is another major thing they would rather not live near. Further, the prison makes California City useless for tourism but ideal for recycling, manufactory, and other businesses that may downgrade the local property.

Where I live we now have a garbage by rail system and it would be logical to concert this system with California City and bless it with the greater industry of eco friendly waste management. It’s close enough to LA, the ninth largest economy in the world, to receive its waste and recycling. No one wants to live next to a dump or recycling plant, but no one wants to live near a prison either.

The prison banishes the tourism dollar from this plot of land but welcomes in so many other forms of economic action. A good amount of what we Californians place in our blue bins just winds up in the trash and is never recycled. This is because we lack the infrastructure to recycle most of our waste.

Now, were we to install that infrastructure in California City we may be able to employ the prison population to do so. This would cut cost and give them valuable job skills. Further, anything that would give our felon population and opportunity to build the case for their parole or commute their sentence would have to be a good thing.

By improving the industry of California City, we would be bettering the lives of the people that live there and creating jobs in a place where there is ample housing. This would take stress off the housing market in LA. We would be hard pressed to create the jobs and housing units needed to resolve the homeless epidemic, but there would only be so many homeless who are willing to move out of LA anyway.

That in mind, many of our homeless are not native but bused in from other states and those busses pass through California City on their way to LA. Why not have them bused to California City where they could be cleaned up and their needs better met. We could then have a case manager work with them before they get to LA or any other place in California helping them secure housing and employment before they arrive.

I know this sounds like a big project and it is, but we are faced with a big problem that will require big solutions. The homeless problem will not go away on its own and it continues to choke the economy that will pay to resolve it. This is my best idea and I’d love to hear yours.

Best,



Richard Leland Neal