‘Squatter’s Paradise’ Slab City May Shut Down

Slab City, an off-grid “squatter’s paradise” that has been the desert home to a shifting population for decades, may soon disappear.

The town exists about 140 miles east of San Diego in the Sonoran Desert. Established over top an abandoned Marine training outpost called Camp Dunlap (which left behind the concrete slabs that became its name), the “city” is home to about 150 year-round residents and up to 2,000 snowbirds who come during the considerably cooler winter months.

There are no real laws that touch the town, and no real services either: no zoning laws and no trash pickup; no property taxes and no running water.

Brought there by poverty, the pursuit of freedom or pure curiosity, the residents are facing major changes. California is trying to sell the 640 acres upon which “the last free place in America” sits. The state has tried before, unsuccessfully, according to a thorough KPBS report.

The specter of a sale has already caused residents to begin organizing, and they have even applied to purchase the land themselves in an effort to appease The Beast–their word for the encroaching outside world, according to the New York Times.

But even the residents owning the land means a landlord, bylaws, regulations and the creation of a governing body, which many residents came here to avoid, according to KPBS.