The great lost city of California, and life in Los Angeles, are explored in new podcasts

This month, two new podcasts aim to look at our state from two very different viewpoints.

LAist Studios in Pasadena, which produces several podcasts, including “Hollywood the Sequel” and “The Big One: Your Survival Guide,” debuted two new shows this month: “California Love” with award-winning New York Times journalist Walter Thompson-Hernández; and “California City” from KPCC 89.3 FM senior reporter Emily Guerin. Both podcasts are available through Apple Podcasts or the iHeartRadio app.

Guerin’s podcast tells the story of California City. Located within the Mojave Desert, California City promised the American Dream to many, but the podcast lays out how the planned community incorporated in 1965 failed to live up to its big plans. While technically the third-largest city in California in terms of size, only 15,000 people live there, the grand dreams of streets, homes and a big artificial lake unrealized.

Guerin, who moved from North Dakota to Los Angeles to work at KPCC, originally went to California City to work on a water story during the drought. She learned that the city’s original developer and a master community plan had failed, leaving the city with over a hundred miles of empty roads with waterlines snaking below.

“I think people are sort of obsessed with stories about these colossal failures and I think that’s why people love ghost towns and ruins so much. Because it’s like a mystery. You want to know what happened,” Guerin said during a recent phone interview.

“There was a pitch being made to people about how it was such a great investment and how if you bought land here now, you’d be rich one day. I just found that very compelling because it seemed so improbable that this almost Gold Rush-era pitch was still being made in 2016.”

As Guerin worked on the piece, she knew she needed more than 4-minute radio segments to fully explore the scope of what had happened with California City. The podcast format was perfect. It allowed her to create a narrative arc, introduce the various players and have them tell their story in their own words, reveal certain things almost as she had discovered them while she was reporting and, of course, come up with some good cliffhangers to keep listeners intrigued until the next episode.

“I think it’s the purest form of audio storytelling and telling a story over several episodes, that’s what our grandparents were doing, sitting around the radio listening to episodic storytelling in the ’40s,” she said. “In some ways, this isn’t original at all, it’s like old school. But I think the podcasts are incredibly satisfying to produce and listen to.”

Thompson-Hernández took a different approach with his “California Love” podcast, which unspools as a memoir. As an individual of mixed race growing up in Southeast Los Angeles, Thompson-Hernández explores what it means to come back home. He spent several years traveling the world as a journalist for The New York Times and said that he felt his upbringing had prepared him for pretty much anything.

“I grew up in a spot where we learned a lot and some of those things were rooted in survival tactics: how to spot dangerous situations, how to read people, how to really tap into your intuition,” he said during a recent phone chat. “All of those skills really helped me not just as a journalist, but as someone who was often in these sort of precarious situations around the world in countries like Madagascar, Belgium and Ghana. Wherever I went there was some form of danger, so to speak, so growing up in Southeast L.A. really prepared me for all that.”

Thompson-Hernández, who currently resides in Lincoln Heights, shares candid stories about his childhood and teenage years throughout “California Love,” and he tapped family members and old friends to speak on a myriad of topics including race and identity, policing in communities of color, and joy and redemption.

“Objectively speaking, I think the timing of this show is so critical,” he said noting all the protests and steps toward social change that have occurred in recent months. “There’s a national conversation that’s growing and forcing people to confront their own biases and prejudices and how people of color have constantly been the subject of different forms of racism. A show like this is unique in the sense that I’m a person of color and I’m telling stories that aren’t sensationalized. They’re not voyeuristic and they’re just honest — but complex and nuanced. I think this is a step in the right direction, and I hope a show like ‘California Love’ can open doors for others.”

There’s a running theme in the podcast as Thompson-Hernández grapples with the notion of belonging.

“That’s really complex for me because how do I break that down,” he asked rhetorically. “Do I talk about how I belong racially? I’m the son a Black man and of a Mexican mother who grew up in L.A. at a time when Black and Brown tensions were really prominent and that impacted me growing up as far as having a healthy conception of who I am.”

“What does it mean to belong politically? I think as a Black and Brown person, my identities are consistently being threatened by the police and local governments and by systemic racism. So for me, those questions about belonging … sometimes I have answers and sometimes I find peace and understanding in that and sometimes I don’t. It’s a question I think I will continue to work through and on for the rest of my life.”

Thompson-Hernández tells his stories in such a compelling way that listeners can relate to the larger conversation about belonging and what it means to be away from home.

“In my travels working on different stories around the world, what I realized is there’s something really universal about this idea of trying to belong and I think in speaking with people of different backgrounds and walks of life, these are the same questions I’ve been asking myself,” he said. “Realizing that I had my own questions became part of this show and a big driving force of this show is me coming back home and really reckoning with these questions of what does home mean and what does it mean to belong and using the city and also my family and friends to try to understand all of that.”