Land speculation, tamed into what we unironically call “real estate”—for what could be less real than an earth emptied of all but monetary value?—would remain one of the state’s dominant economic motors. It is not hard to draw a straight line from the settler hustles of early statehood to the inequities that map California today. James Irvine arrived in 1849 and figured out he could make more money selling goods to miners than by mining himself. He funneled his profits into San Francisco real estate and Mexican land grants in southern California, ultimately holding title to about one hundred thousand acres. In the late twentieth century much of that land, still owned by the Irvine Company, would be subdivided into “master-planned communities” throughout what had by then become suburban Orange County. The Irvine Company now owns sixty-five thousand apartments and forty shopping centers and has been a major financial supporter of groups organized to defend California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot initiative that froze property taxes, hobbling the state’s ability to fund education, health care, and public housing. Legitimated by a century and a half of dedicated lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists, the grifts are subtler these days, but the results are the same: vast wealth remains in a few, very powerful hands.