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Other immigrants are finding new starts in real estate, insurance, farming and stock raising. Mojave desert realtors obligingly indoctrinate home buyers in the business of poultry raising, sell them the equipment along with their new homes, even arrange the buying (on credit) of chicks and feed and the marketing of the grown product. Today, a new housing project near Lancaster claims to be the most concentrated poultry raising area in the U.S., with every backyard a crowded chicken run.
More spectacularly, the new desert boom is studded with examples of settlers who have come up fast and furiously:
¶ Near Victorville, Calif., Goerge McCarthy was trying to make ends meet by running a small guest ranch. Two years ago he sold a piece of Mojave Desert land that had cost him $180. His price: $250,000. Today he is subdividing 3,300 acres that cost him less than $1 an acre into half-acre tracts to sell for $2,000 apiece.
¶ Del E. Webb, once a Phoenix carpenter, became a builder, grew with the desert boom, is now a multimillionaire contractor and developer, with interests ranging from oil to part ownership of the New York Yankees.
¶ In Arizona's Paradise Valley, where Frank Lloyd Wright and his students at nearby Taliesin West design homes for desert living. Realtor Merle Cheney bought 6,000 acres of land for as low as 25¢ an acre, now sells it at prices up to $3,000 an acre.
¶In Apple Valley, Calif., Long Beach Oilmen Newton Bass and Bernard Westlund developed 26,000 acres of desert land they bought in 1946 for an average of $50 an acre into a plush resort, now use 90 salesmen and a fleet of radio-controlled cars to sell half-acre lots for as much as $11,500.
Success stories like these set many desert newcomers shooting in all directions, wavering in a single day between buying a laundry and investing in a tungsten mine. Optimistic and energetic in a new land, they dream big dreams to match the big country. Those with capital look for investments and find them: Ontario (Calif.) Aircraft Executive Glenn Odekirk has interests in desert tungsten and uranium; Hollywood Actor John Ireland and Tennis Star Don Budge are building a swank, $298,000 racquet club outside Phoenix. The less well-heeled look for likely sites for gas stations, ice-cream routes, or the acquaintance of semebody "who's got something good." Even those without cash find it easier on the desert to try new jobs and to borrow money with no more collateral than a good idea.
No Place But Here. Water has always been the limiting factor to the desert's growth. There are few places on the desert where a man, for a price, cannot sink a well and bring up water. But the price is sometimes prohibitive, and the water table is going down. The Colorado is tapped for domestic and industrial use in Nevada's Clark County, for irrigation in the Yuma area of Arizona and (via the long All-American and Coachella Canals) in the Imperial Valley and the Coachella Valley, and for domestic consumption in Los Angeles. As the area grows and demand increases, men will have to find new sources of supply. When that time arrives, area officials hope that scientists will have learned how to convert sea water into fresh water at an economic price.