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About a third of the houses in Palm Springs have nobody living in them. They are not abandoned or condemned. They are owned, furnished, insured, and dark for eight or nine months a year waiting on somebody who flies in from Vancouver or
Explores why Palm Springs is losing residents due to climate, housing, and historical factors despite its resort fame.
Key Takeaways
- Palm Springs faces a demographic decline driven by climate extremes and unaffordable housing.
- The city's unique history of land ownership and racial exclusion shaped its social and economic landscape.
- Tourism and seasonal residency dominate the local economy but create instability for permanent residents.
- Environmental challenges like drought and heatwaves pose ongoing threats to the city’s future.
- Despite its glamorous image, Palm Springs struggles with social inequality and sustainability.
What the video covers
- About one-third of Palm Springs homes are unoccupied for most of the year, owned by seasonal visitors.
- The permanent population is shrinking, with a nearly 6% decline from 2019 to 2024 and a median age of 58.5.
- High home prices and conversion of houses into vacation rentals have made it unaffordable for many local workers.
- Palm Springs has a history of boom and bust, previously abandoned due to drought and floods before becoming a resort town.
- The area's development was shaped by complex land ownership, including a checkerboard of tribal and railroad lands.
- The town grew as a health retreat for tuberculosis patients before evolving into a celebrity resort in the 20th century.
- Racial covenants historically excluded minorities from most areas except tribal lands, which became home to many workers.
- The city’s fame was boosted by Hollywood stars and the Rat Pack, making it a cultural hotspot.
- Recent extreme heat and environmental challenges threaten the city’s appeal and livability.
- Palm Springs' economy heavily depends on tourism and hotel occupancy, which is seasonal and unstable.
Chapters
- 00:00Vacant Homes and Population Decline
- 02:19Railroad Land Grants and Tribal Reservation
- 04:07Early Farming Attempts and Water Challenges
- 06:08Tuberculosis Sanatorium and Resort Development
- 07:54Hollywood Influence and Celebrity Culture
- 09:53Modernism and Architectural Innovation
- 11:43Tribal Land Issues and Racial Covenants
- 15:58Cultural Plaza and Tribal Ownership Today
- 20:29Economic Challenges and Demographic Shifts
- 24:48Tourism Dependency and Seasonal Population
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Seattle when the weather turns. Out of roughly 35,000 residential units in the city, only about 24,000 are occupied by anyone at all. The permanent population is around 45,000 and [music] shrinking.
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Census estimates put the drop at nearly 6% between 2019 and 2024. [music] The median age is 58.5 years old. There are 159 men for every 100 women. [music] And most of the people who cook the food and clean the rooms cannot afford to
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live there because the median home passed $600,000 and roughly 2,800 houses have been converted into vacation rentals. [music] The strange part is that Palm Springs has emptied out before. By 1905, the town was nearly deserted. By 1992, the
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mall downtown was closing and it would stand vacant for the next two decades. [music] Both times, somebody showed up to buy the place back. What is pushing people out this round is harder to negotiate with. [music] It was 124° in July of
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2024. There were 136 days above 100 in a single year and 120 golf courses [music] still have to be kept green in a valley that gets 3 in of rain. Everything here starts with water, which is the joke
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that runs the length of the story. Long before anyone printed the name Palm Springs on a map, the Kawia called this place Seki, [music] meaning boiling water, after the hot mineral spring that pushes up through the valley floor at
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the base of Mount Sanhasinto. [music] The Awa Caliente band of Kawia Indians had lived around that spring and in the palm canyons behind it for thousands of years. Then the surveyors came. In the 1870s, the federal government wanted a
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railroad through the Sonoran Desert and paid for it in land, granting the Southern Pacific the odd-numbered square mile sections for 10 miles on either side of the track. On May 15th, 1876, President Ulissiz S. Grant [music] signed an executive order setting aside
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section 14 and part of section [music] 22 as the Awa Caliente Indian Reservation. A year later, President Rutherford B.
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Hayes expanded the boundaries and put the even-numbered sections [music] in trust for the tribe. What that produced was a checkerboard.
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One square mile of reservation, one square mile of railroad land alternating across the desert floor for miles in every direction [music] with no thought given to the fact that a city might one day be built on top of it. The
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reservation today runs to roughly 32,000 acres, about 6,700 of which sit [music] inside Palm Springs city limits, which makes the Aua Caleiente the largest single land owner in the city they were never supposed to share.
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And by pure accident of the grid, the square that held the hot spring, [music] the reason anybody stopped here in the first place, landed on the tribal side of the board. The first outsider to try to make a living from the place was a
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San Francisco attorney and former state senator named John Guthrie McCllum. He came in 1884 looking for dry air for a son with tuberculosis.
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bought 320 acres of what is now downtown and decided the valley could be farmed.
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In 1887, he incorporated the Palm Valley Land and Water Company and auctioned off 137 parcels. [music] He spent around $60,000 of his own money building a 19-mile ditch lined with stone and redwood flume to pull water off the
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Whitewater River and carry it into the sand. Oranges went in, grapes, apricots, and alfalfa followed. Settlers arrived.
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For a few years, the scheme actually worked. And by 1893, Macllum held more than 6,000 acres. Then the weather ended it. That same year, the valley took 21 straight days of rain, a flood that wrecked [music] the crops, and tore out
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the irrigation ditch that made all of it possible. Behind the flood came an 11-year drought that ran from 1894 to 1905. [music] The orchards died. Farmers who had bought parcels on credit defaulted and walked away. Macllum lost two sons in their 20s and died in 1897
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at 70. Land rich and effectively broke. Having just learned that the federal government had ruled against him on the water rights he needed.
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Wellwood Murray, who had built the town's first hotel at Macallum's urging, tried to sell it, failed, and closed the doors for good in 1909.
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Palm Springs was a ghost of a real estate pitch with a few hundred people and a hot spring. And that is the town's true starting condition. It has been abandoned before it was ever famous.
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What saved it was sickness. [music] The same dry air Macllum had come for turned out to be the only export the valley had. And in the era before antibiotics, doctors sent tubercular patients into the desert the way they
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sent them to Switzerland. Nelly Kaufman arrived from Santa Monica in 1908, looked at a village still flat on its back from the drought, and saw a business. [music] She opened the Desert Inn in 1909, first as a sanatorium for
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consumptives, and then as she gradually pushed the sick guests out in favor of the comfortable ones as a resort.
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Kaufman understood something the farmers never had. Nobody was going to get rich growing fruit in a place with 3 in of annual rainfall, but people with money would pay handsomely to sit in the sun and be told it was good for them. Other
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hotels followed. The Elm Miridor opened in the late 1920s with a bell tower and a swimming pool, and the Desert Village started appearing in Los Angeles newspapers as [music] somewhere fashionable. The town incorporated in 1938, drawing city boundaries that
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swallowed roughly 8,000 acres of tribal land in the process, [music] a decision that would generate lawsuits for the next 50 years.
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By then, the population was still only in the low thousands. [music] The exclusivity was written into the paperwork from the beginning.
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Restrictive [music] covenants on deeds and hotel policies that quietly refused black and Jewish guests were standard practice across the resort era. And the people doing the cooking, gardening, laundry, and construction [music] had to live somewhere within walking distance
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of the jobs. The one place in town where they were permitted to rent happened to be the square mile of tribal land immediately behind the hotels. Nobody thought much about that arrangement while it was cheap and convenient, which
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is [music] exactly how it lasted for 40 years. The thing that turned a health retreat into an international name had nothing to do with the climate at all. It came out of a contract negotiation in Hollywood. Studio bosses in the 1930s
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had a problem with their contract players who kept disappearing on weekends. [music] The fix was a clause requiring the talent to remain within two hours of the studio in case a set went sideways and they were needed back. Two hours west was
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ocean. Two hours north was farmland full of nobody. Two hours east through the San Gonio Pass was a village with a hot spring, no press corps, and a police department that could be reasoned with.
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That accident of driving time made Palm Springs. In 1934, the actors Charlie Frell and Ralph Bellamy bought 53 acres of windblown scrub for $3,500, put in tennis courts, and opened the racket club that December. Within a few
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years, the club was where the industry went to behave badly out of frame. Clark Gable played chess on the lawn. A young Marilyn Monroe was photographed at the pool by Bruno Bernard before anyone knew her name. And the introduction that
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followed is the origin story every Palm Springs tour guide still tells. Jack Benny broadcast a radio episode mocking how hard it was to get in. Frank Sinatra hired the architect E. Stewart Williams in 1947 and built Twin Palms, a low
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glass house with a piano-shaped swimming pool. And the Rat Pack made the desert an extension of the Sunset Strip.
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The neighborhood where they clustered is still called the movie colony. None of it was planned by the city. Palm Springs simply happened to sit at
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piece that outlived everything [music] else. Because land was cheap and the clients were rich and unafraid, Palm Springs became a laboratory for a kind of modernism that had nowhere else to go. Richard Nitra built the Kaufman Desert House in 1946. All glass and
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stone planes pushed out into the sand. Albert Fry moved there permanently and [music] spent decades building aluminum and steel structures into the hillsides, including a house with a boulder running through the living room. Donald Wexler built houses framed entirely in steel
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[music] because lumber was expensive and the desert ate wood. William Chrysle drew tracked homes for the Alexander Construction Company, which put up more [music] than 2,000 of them across the city in the 1950s and60s, varying roof lines and
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entryways [music] so that a subdivision of nearly identical houses read as a neighborhood of custom homes.
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That is why a middleclass post-war suburb in the desert ended up on the cover of design magazines.
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The aerial tramway opened in 1963, hauling tourists from the desert floor to Alpine Forest [music] in 14 minutes.
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Elvis leased a butterfly roofed house in 1966 and honeymooned in it. Bob Hope built a mushroom-shaped compound on a ridge that pilots used as a landmark.
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For about 25 years, Palm Springs was the most photographed small town in America. And roughly three blocks behind the shops where all this was being photographed, the city was preparing to burn down a neighborhood. The tribe's own position through all of this was
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close to absurd. Congress had authorized the reservation land to be allotted to individual Aua Caliente members back in 1917 with the titles held in trust by the federal government. And then the Interior Department simply did not do it. Decades passed. Members watched a
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resort city rise on land recorded in their names while they live without the ability to sell it, lease it for any meaningful term, or borrow a dollar against it. Lawsuits filed in 1936 dragged on for another 20 years.
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The equalization of the allotments was not finalized until 1959, dividing tribal land among 104 members, at which point newspapers started describing the Aua Caliente as the richest Indians in America, a phrase that meant nothing at all to people who
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had spent their lives unable to touch their own property. The 99-year lease law arrived the same year and changed the value of every tribal square on the checkerboard overnight, which is precisely when the conservators appeared. The tribe fought
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its way out of that arrangement and then kept fighting, suing the city over who had zoning authority on reservation land, a question that ran for years and fed into a line of federal decisions recognizing that tribes retain attributes of sovereignty over their
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territory. The band renamed itself the Aua Caliente Band of Kawia Indians in 1977. It is worth holding both halves of that timeline in your head at once because they were happening in the same square mile. While Sinatra was building a glass
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house with a piano-shaped pool a few minutes north, the people who owned the ground under downtown Palm Springs were being assigned courtappointed managers to spend their money for them. Section 14 was that odd square of the checkerboard. One mile of tribal trust
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land bounded by Indian Canyon, Sunrise Way, Allejo, and Ramon. Because it sat in trust, city rules over it were murky.
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And because Palm Springs enforced racial covenants everywhere else, section 14 became the only part of town where black, Latino, and native [music] families could actually live. During and after the Second World War, roughly [music] a thousand black residents
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settled there alongside Mexican-American families and tribal members. They rented monthtomonth, built what they could, and got almost no city services, and then were blamed for the conditions that produced.
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Meanwhile, the tribe itself could not develop the land because federal law blocked long leases. So, the members were land rich and cash poor at the same time.
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In 1959, Congress finally allowed 99-year leases, which made section 14 the most valuable undeveloped dirt in the Coachella Valley overnight.
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The system built to manage that windfall was a [music] conservatorship and guardianship program run out of the Indo courthouse in which judges appointed lawyers, businessmen, and their associates to control tribal members land and money. The conservators charged fees. In one case, a Kawia boy's
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guardians took more than $20,000 in fees out of a total income of just over 23,000.
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Those same conservators began terminating leases [music] and evicting the tenants of section 14. Between roughly 1959 and 1966, the city carried out what it called abatement. Homes were bulldozed. Homes were set on fire, sometimes with the residents belongings still inside,
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sometimes before the legal notice period had run. A historical study commissioned by the city later put the number at about 197 structures and as many as a thousand people displaced.
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A 1968 investigation by the California Attorney General's office found no prosecutable crime, then used a phrase that has followed the city ever since, [music] describing what happened as a city engineered holocaust.
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George Ringwald of the Riverside Press Enterprise [music] won a Pulitzer that same year for exposing the conservatorship racket and the program was shut down. Nobody was charged with anything. Palm Springs got its downtown parking and its commercial frontage and the families who had lived
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on section 14 scattered across the valley [music] and out of the city's political life entirely. The reckoning took another half century. [music] In 2021, the city formally apologized. In 2022 [music] it removed the statue of Frank Bogurt, the cowboy mayor who had presided over
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the clearances from the front of city hall. In November 2024, after a 4-year campaign led by survivor Pearl Dvers and attorney Arriva Martin, the city council voted unanimously to approve a settlement worth about $5.9 million in direct payments split among roughly
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1,200 survivors and descendants alongside $20 million in housing programs and $1 million for small business support. The city transferred the money in 2025.
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Divide 5.9 million by 1,200 people, [music] and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast, which the survivors said plainly at the time. What the settlement could not restore was the compounding.
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60 years of home equity in a city where the median house now runs north of $600,000 is a number that does not fit on a check.
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And the second irony is structural. The Aua Caliente band, the people the checkerboard was drawn to contain, [music] spent those same decades winning in court, developing their sections, and building casinos.
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In 2023, they opened the Aua Caliente Cultural Plaza on the site of the old Spa Hotel, including a museum and a 40,000 square ft spa built directly over the hotring at Siki with 22 private mineral baths. The tribe now owns the
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ground the resort industry stands [music] on. Everyone else in this story is renting above ground. The 1960s were the peak of everything the town had been building toward. Golf became the local religion with the Palm Springs Golf Classic launching in 1960 and picking up
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Bob [music] Hope's name a few years later, which put the valley on network television every winter with celebrities and sitting presidents walking the fairways. Eisenhower came, Kennedy came, Gerald Ford eventually retired down the road in Rancho Mirage, and Walt Disney
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kept a house in the valley. The aerial tramway carried visitors up 8,000 ft to snow in the same afternoon they'd been sitting by a pool. In 1963, Warner Brothers released a film called Palm Springs Weekend, a piece of studio fluff
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about college students descending on the town over Easter break, and it functioned as the most effective tourism advertisement in the [music] city's history, though not in the way anyone intended.
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Every march afterward, more of them showed up. Meanwhile, the developers kept pouring concrete. The golf [music] courses kept multiplying across the valley floor, and nobody in a position of authority asked the obvious question [music] about where the water for all of
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it was going to come from in 50 years. The answer then and now is an aquifer supplemented by Colorado River water hauled in through a canal. For a while, that arithmetic worked beautifully because the desert was cheap, the power
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was cheap, the labor was cheap, and air conditioning had made a place with 4 months of lethal summer heat into a yearround proposition.
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Palm Springs in 1965 had the sun, the architecture, the celebrities, the [music] golf, and the illusion that none of it required a bill to ever come due.
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Every single one of those things was on a clock. The glamour years, meanwhile, were already ending. Jet travel was the first blow [music] because a rule about 2 hours driving distance stops mattering when Aapulco and Hawaii are a non-stop flight away.
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And the studio contract system that created the rule collapsed anyway. [music] Wealthy retirees kept coming, but the fashionable crowd drifted down valley to Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert, where the newer country clubs and the newer malls were. What Palm Springs got
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instead [music] was spring break. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, tens of thousands of college students packed Palm Canyon Drive every March, and the town made real money on it right up until it did not. On Saturday, March
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29th, [music] 1986, the crowd on Palm Canyon turned. People climbed on cars, bottles came down, storefronts were smashed, and the police called for backup from other agencies. Dozens were arrested. The footage ran on national television, and for the retirees who had
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bought houses in a quiet desert town, that was the end of the discussion. In 1988, a restrator with a famous name and a grievance about a sign permit ran for mayor in a seven-way race and won [music] with nearly twice the votes of his
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nearest rival. Sunonny Bono spent his term dismantling spring break with a bluntness that got him mocked nationally. The council banned thonged bikinis in public. It banned water balloons and squirt [music] guns.
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Motorcycles were pushed off Palm Canyon Drive and in 1991 the city put concrete barricades across the main streets. Bono patrolled downtown himself on a Harley [music] and pulled over a speeding spring breaker for the cameras. The strategy worked completely. The students
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went to Lake Havsu and Mexico and never came back. and Palm Springs entered the 1990s with no students, no movie stars, and a median age climbing toward the mid50s.
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The emptying that followed is the part locals still describe with a wse. The Desert Inn, Nelly Kaufman's old hotel, had been demolished in the 1960s [music] and replaced by an enclosed shopping mall that opened in 1967 and was
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rebranded the Desert Fashion Plaza after a mid 1980s renovation. It had Imagnon. It had Saks Fth Avenue, and it charged for parking in Southern California, which locals will tell you was the fatal decision. Sales slid through the late
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1980s. [music] Anchor tenants left in 1991. Im Magnon closed in 1992, declaring downtown Palm Springs unsuitable for its customers.
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Shoppers walked past shuttered [music] storefronts through empty corridors just to reach Sachs. And when Saxs moved to El Paseo in Palm Desert in 2001, the building was finished. 13 acres of dead mall then sat in the exact center of the
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city for more than a decade while plans [music] came and went and a ballot measure to put a casino in it failed. Demolition [music] finally began in February 2013.
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Around that hollow core, the town became a punchline about waiting rooms and early dinners. And the mid-century houses that are now worth millions were selling for very little because a small glass box with a flat roof in [music]
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the desert was not what the American housing market wanted in 1994. Which is exactly why the next chapter happened. Gay men and women from Los Angeles priced out of the coast and looking for weekend property [music] started buying those cheap modernist
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houses through the late 1980s and 1990s, restoring them and then moving in permanently. The community that resulted is the highest per capita concentration of LGBTQ residents of any city in the United States with local estimates running from a [music] third to half the
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permanent population. Ron Odin was elected mayor in 2003, becoming the first openly gay black mayor of an American city. [music] In December 2017, the city seated the nation's first all LGBTQ city council, which included Lisa Middleton, the first
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outtransgender person elected to non-judicial office in California. The architecture that had been an embarrassment [music] became the entire brand. Modernism week now fills hotels in February. The Coacella Festival 20 m down the valley put the region back in
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front of an audience under 30. Downtown got a $400 [music] million redevelopment on the old mall site anchored by a sevenstory Kemp. Then Airbnb arrived and turned every restored Alexander tracked [music] house into a revenue stream. And the pandemic poured
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accelerant on all of it as remote workers and secondhome buyers bid up desert real estate. Hotel tax revenue hit record highs. For about 5 years, Palm Springs looked like the greatest comeback story in Southern California.
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The unwinding started with the things the comeback was built on. Vacation rentals were the first fight. Residents watched neighborhoods convert to nightly rentals and put a near total ban on the 2018 ballot as measure C and it lost
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badly with roughly 68% voting no. Four years later, the council did it by ordinance instead, capping short-term rental certificates at 20% of the homes in any given neighborhood. And in the capped neighborhoods, sale prices fell sharply because a house that cannot be
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rented is worth less to the only buyers still shopping. Roughly 2,800 of the city's 35,000 units are registered vacation rentals now, [music] and a third of all housing stock sits vacant.
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Then the weather stopped being a marketing asset. In 2020, Palm Springs recorded 136 days at or above 100 degrees, [music] breaking a record set in 1958.
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On July 5th, 2024, the airport hit 124, an all-time high for a city with more than a century of records. [music] Overnight lows during those weeks stayed in the '90s.
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Water is the other side of the same bill. The Coachella Valley gets about 3 in of rain a year and holds more than 120 golf courses, [music] roughly 14% of every course in California, consuming somewhere around 37 billion gallons
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annually. Palm Springs residents have repeatedly used three to four times the state [music] per capita average, partly because the water underneath them has been cheap. And the state has now handed the local agency reduction targets of [music] about 20% in the near term and
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32% by 2040. Meanwhile, the money softened. Transient occupancy tax collections, the single largest source of city revenue at roughly $49 million a year, slid [music] 3.6% 6% in the first quarter of fiscal 2025 to 26 with vacation rental and small hotel receipts
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falling hardest. The council was warned to [music] expect a $9.9 million operating deficit and adopted the city's first formal economic strategy aimed at depending less on tourism.
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Canadian snowbirds, [music] a huge share of the winter population for decades, began cancelling [music] over politics, tariffs, and the exchange rate, and Porter Airlines dropped its Toronto route. By spring [music] of 2026, the picture had partly recovered with the general fund projecting a
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surplus and hotel taxes up slightly year-over-year, which tells you how thin the margin is in a city where one bad winter of bookings [music] decides the budget. The response to all of this tells you how the math actually
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looks from inside city hall. Palm Springs makes its living on hotel rooms, and hotel rooms turned out to be the most fragile revenue source a city can have. So, the plan now is to build something that does not depend on
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tourists showing up in a good mood. The airport is the one piece performing above expectations, setting a record with 493,450 passengers in a single march and running an $80 million baggage handling replacement. [music] The rest of the strategy is stranger. In
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a city whose entire identity is glass houses, palm trees, and leisure, the officials have been pinning revenue projections on fulfillment centers and warehouses in the north end of town with developers [music] estimating that a single 700,000 square ft distribution
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building could throw off around $7.6 million a year in local sales tax. The town that Hollywood invented as an escape from work is now hoping to be paid by logistics.
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Meanwhile, the ordinary cost of living there keeps grinding upward. Median household income sits around $73,000, which is not a service wage because the service workers largely commute in from Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Coacella [music] and Indo. driving past the wind turbines
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in the San Gorgonio Pass to clean rooms in a city they cannot afford to sleep in. State funding for the city's homeless navigation center ran out.
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Utility and insurance costs in a place that runs air conditioning for a third of the year are not going down. And the valley's oldest structural problem sits at the far end of it where the salt and sea keep shrinking and the communities
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out there have spent decades absorbing the consequences of somebody else's water use. The postcard covers about 8 square miles. The bill covers the whole valley. Add it together and you get a place that is full and empty at the same
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time. In season, Palm Springs is packed. The airport sets passenger [music] records and the restaurants have a two-week wait. In August, entire streets have nobody on them. The people leaving are the ones the postcards never showed.
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The line cooks, the housekeepers, the landscapers, the teachers, the young families who cannot buy a $600,000 house on a service wage in a town where a third of the inventory is somebody's third home. Median age 58.5 and climbing. Population down nearly 6%
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in five years. This is the fourth time the valley has run this exact cycle.
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Macllum's farmers left when the water quit. The movie stars left when the airlines made distance meaningless. The shoppers and the students left when the city decided it wanted a different kind of visitor. and the restorers who came after them made the houses so valuable
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that the workforce cannot live near them. Palm Springs has never been a town that people stayed in. It has been a town that people came to for a season, for a cure, [music] for a weekend, for a bargain, and then left when the terms
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changed. The Kawia are the only ones who have been here the whole time, and they got the hotring back. Everyone else has always been a tenant, including the ones holding deeds. The desert does not evict anybody. It just raises the rent [music]
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in degrees. Thanks for sticking around all the way to the end. I really do appreciate it. If you've got a few more minutes, there's another one of my videos on the screen right now that I think you'd like. And if you felt like
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subscribing, it would help me out more than you'd guess [music] since I don't see a dime of ad revenue until this thing hits 1,000 subs.
Topics:Palm SpringsCaliforniapopulation declinehousing crisisvacation rentalsclimate changetribal landtourismhistorycelebrity resort
