Southern California power, explained with care.
California City carries a measured LAist reporting style into stories where civic promises meet hard consequences. Recent episodes move from ICE detention and LAUSD turmoil to fire response, Route 66 history, preschool oversight, Hollywood representation, and LA28 power politics.
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California City is a Southern California news magazine from LAist with a reporting backbone. It is measured, civic, and often grave. The show is less interested in spectacle than in the chain of decisions that leaves ordinary people living with public consequences. Recent episodes range widely, but they share a clear habit: begin with a visible event, then trace the institutions behind it. One episode follows reports of rotten food, disease, isolation, and deaths connected to the Adelanto ICE detention center. Another looks at LAUSD as budget pressure, declining enrollment, possible labor action, and a federal investigation converge around students and staff. Fire accountability becomes a story of emergency management, warning systems, staffing, weather, and the unanswered questions left after the Eaton Fire. Education policy becomes a test of whether California can spend billions on transitional kindergarten while failing to track whether the program is working. The show also turns toward culture with the same scrutiny. A segment on Best Picture nominees uses spoken-word data to ask what Hollywood values when women receive a fraction of the dialogue. A Route 66 episode complicates nostalgia by placing road-trip mythology beside Black migration to California. Even the Big Bear bald eagles Jackie and Shadow are treated with careful context, not sentimentality alone. Nereida Moreno typically anchors the work through plain, direct questions. Reporters then answer in fuller arcs, moving from scene to data to implication. That rhythm makes complex stories easier to follow without flattening them. The show’s strength is not speed. It is proportion. Money, politics, public trust, and accountability recur across stories about schools, detention, disaster response, film, early education, and the LA28 Olympics. The result is a grounded listen for people who want California stories with names, numbers, and consequences attached.
Made for: For listeners who follow Los Angeles, California policy, public institutions, and culture closely enough to want more than headlines. It suits people drawn to reported context, accountability questions, and humane explanations of complicated civic stories.
What sets it apart: California City brings a public-radio news magazine structure to stories that often sit between local reporting and wider consequence. Its strongest episodes pair named people and reported scenes with budgets, data, institutional records, and historical context.
Deep in the Mojave Desert, there is a little town with a big name and a bizarre history: California City. For decades, real estate developers have sold a dream here: if you buy land now, you’ll be rich one day. Thousands of people bought this dream. Many were young couples and hard-working immigrants looking to build a better future. But much of the land they bought is nearly worthless. In this new podcast from LAist Studios, host Emily Guerin tells a story of money, power and deception.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Nereida Moreno turns institutional reporting into clear human stories about responsibility, preparedness and the consequences of public decisions.
California City follows Los Angeles institutions into the moment when policy becomes lived consequence. Nereida Moreno leads conversations with LAist reporters through clear, practical questions, moving from an event to the systems around it.
A fire evacuation plan meets the one question paperwork hates: who actually followed it?
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A patient, humane eagle-nest story that lets the loss land without overplaying it.
The episode stays close to Jackie and Shadow, the Big Bear bald eagles whose nesting season has become a public ritual, then shifts into the harder turn when ravens enter the nest and both eggs are lost. The result feels intimate rather than dramatic for its own sake.
A serious report on Adelanto, detention conditions, and the human cost of ICE custody.
The piece on Adelanto ICE detention center is a grave, carefully reported look at immigration detention in Southern California. Julia Barajas stays with the people at the center of the story, following detainees, families, activists, and officials as she traces multiple deaths…
A clear LAUSD report that turns a school budget crisis into human stakes.
This episode treats LAUSD's current strain with calm, steady reporting: lower attendance after immigration raids, a budget hole that triggered layoffs, friction around Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, and a strike threat pressing on the district.
A procedural fire-response story that makes accountability feel immediate.
This episode keeps the Eaton Fire response centered on accountability: what happened inside LA County's Office of Emergency Management, how a whistleblower complaint brought the issue back into view, and why the public is still asking who should answer for it.
A clear look at the fight over voter data, privacy, and election power.
California's voter rolls sit at the center of the story, and the episode keeps that dispute legible as it moves between federal pressure, state privacy law, and access to unredacted personal data.
A sober check-in on fire recovery that keeps Altadena and the human scale in view.
An episode returns to Los Angeles a year after the January fires and asks a plain question: what does recovery look like when whole blocks are still empty and many households are still figuring out how to rebuild?
A careful account of how preparedness failed the people it was meant to protect.
The episode follows the gap between a careful evacuation plan and the moment it mattered, when the people meant to carry it out were not there.
A careful account of how gender-affirming care for youth is becoming harder to reach in Los Angeles and beyond.
The episode tracks the tightening future of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Los Angeles, opening with Children's Hospital Los Angeles closing its Los Angeles Center for Trans Youth Health and Development.
ABC Audio's Theranos fraud series that also introduces its other true-crime podcasts.
Patrick Radden Keefe investigates whether the CIA secretly wrote a Scorpions hit.
Jake Halpern and the Snowball team track a con artist who defrauded a family.
A city-by-city true-crime documentary, from Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to mob confessions.
Imperfect Paradise host Nereida Moreno and LAist correspondent Jill Replogal examine Prop 39, a constitutional amendment requiring government-issued ID to vote in California.
Jackie and Shadow are back in the nest.
ICE detention is the center of concern.
LAUSD is under pressure from all sides.
Erin Stone reports on a whistleblower complaint from L.A.
This episode examines gender disparity in the 2026 Oscars Best Picture nominees, analyzing how women speak only a quarter of the words and what this reveals about Hollywood's values.
This episode explores the 100-year legacy of Route 66, highlighting its iconic status in American culture and its role in Black migration to California.
This episode investigates California's failure to track the effectiveness of its multi-billion dollar universal preschool program for four-year-olds, despite high costs and demand.
This episode examines how Casey Wasserman's connections to Jeffrey Epstein are creating controversy and raising questions about money, politics, and power as he continues to lead the LA28 Olympics organizing committee.
This episode of Imperfect Paradise takes listeners inside an Orange County immigration court to examine how the Trump administration's policies are affecting immigrants, lawyers, and judges.
This episode examines the failures in emergency response and accountability following catastrophic wildfires in Southern California, comparing recent fires to past events.
This episode of Imperfect Paradise examines the Trump administration's immigration policy changes, focusing on legal immigrants caught in limbo.
This episode examines the LAPD's request for tens of millions in taxpayer money for policing the 2028 Olympics and questions who will ultimately pay for the games.
A voter file fight gets personal.
One year later, the lots are still mostly empty.
This episode explores how some filmmakers in Hollywood are embracing AI in their work, contrasting with fears of replacement discussed in a previous episode.
This episode explores why animators in Hollywood feel particularly vulnerable to AI technology, especially in light of recent developments like Disney's agreement with OpenAI and the 2023 industry strikes.
This episode explores the modern space race, focusing on commercial spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and their missions to Mars.
Fires made a fragile promise hard to trust.
This episode explores how two Altadena childcare providers struggle to rebuild after the Eaton Fire, revealing gaps in government disaster response and raising questions about support for caregivers.
Children's Hospital Los Angeles closed the center.
This episode discusses the impact of increased ICE presence in hospitals on patient care and rights.
This episode discusses California's expansion of transitional kindergarten to all four-year-olds, its impact on families and schools, and what parents need to know.
This episode examines the financial and historical context of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, questioning whether the city can avoid the debt seen in other host cities.
This episode investigates the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, its health and environmental impacts, and why the facility remains open ten years later.
This episode covers immigration raids and protests across the nation, focusing on the impact of Trump administration policies in Los Angeles.
This episode covers the legal claim filed by former LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley against Mayor Karen Bass, revisiting their feud during the January wildfires.
This episode examines how people with severe mental illness end up incarcerated and the fight for transparency in police use of force investigations.
A deep dive into the history and deception behind California City, a desert town sold as a dream investment.
This episode explores how radicalization and conspiracy theories are moving from fringe to mainstream, focusing on New Age wellness circles.
The episode examines political blame and media criticism following the Los Angeles wildfires, focusing on attacks against Mayor Karen Bass and Fire Chief Kristen Crowley.
A narrative documentary about a fraudulent real estate scheme in California City, exploring how developers sold worthless land to hopeful buyers.
This episode investigates the causes of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles.
A narrative investigation into a real estate scam in California City, where developers sold worthless land to hopeful buyers.