Calabasas would be ripe territory for a certain kind of writer. The iconography is all there — the freeways and gas stations, the parched red hills teeming with rattlesnakes. You could easily imagine them taking notes, out there in the middle of nowhere but so close to somewhere, trying to discern how this particular hub of car dealerships and office parks became the new center of popular culture.
Kanye West saw it first (or maybe second, after Kris Jenner). A suburb of a suburb, Calabasas, population 22,000, with no heritage or identity (except that most of the houses were built in the 1980s and seem to be over 9,000 square feet), a place he could mold and shape and brand to his image. When Kim and Kanye began their $40 million renovation of a $20 million mansion, Kanye declared (in the title of an unreleased album he recorded with Drake), Calabasas Is the New Abu Dhabi, words which appeared on billboards in L.A. And there is something about its sudden rise that feels like other desert cities — Las Vegas or Dubai — that seemingly materialized overnight through the sheer power of money and ambition.
