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And so it was that the desert brought forth swimming pools and convenience stores beyond number, and wide empty streets as far as the eye could see. The commute to jobs in the city was longer-an hour longer, at least, each way-but that was the trade-off. What was more, the air was cleaner and the streets were safer. In the Antelope Valley, one could buy for two hundred thousand dollars a new house that might cost four hundred thousand in the San Fernando Valley. The Antelope Valley had been considered too remote for commuters, but the completion of the Antelope Valley Freeway, snaking over the San Gabriel Mountains, helped change that. This hyper-expansion was first sparked by housing prices in Los Angeles and its nearer suburbs, which soared during the nineteen-eighties, and by white flight from an increasingly Latino and Asian city. By 1994, their combined population was two hundred and twenty-two thousand, and today estimates of the Valley’s total population range as high as four hundred thousand. In 1980, the combined population of Lancaster and Palmdale, the Valley’s two main cities, was sixty thousand. The transformation of the Antelope Valley from rural desert into modern suburbia-with neighborhoods, literally, to burn-was very sudden, a historical jump cut. When I drove through its curving streets last year, I found a wasteland (tumbleweeds, shopping carts, graffiti-covered sofas) surrounded by a high brown wall. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover went on a memorable rampage through the tract. The Legends had become available after its financing failed, leaving unfinished forty-eight large, Spanish-style homes, each named after a legendary American (Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe). used a development called the Legends, at Avenue J and Thirtieth Street West, in the city of Lancaster. In 1992, for the fiery climax of “Lethal Weapon 3,” Warner Bros. Now they come when they need to burn down or blow up a housing tract. It was empty country, a good backdrop for Westerns.

Film companies used to come to the Antelope Valley, in northern Los Angeles County, to shoot high-desert scenes.