Buying Land in Inyo County: Why Private Land Is So Scarce

How Los Angeles came to own so much of the Owens Valley

In the early 1900s, agents for the City of Los Angeles quietly began purchasing water rights and the land carrying them throughout the Owens Valley, anticipating the city's growth and needing a reliable water source well beyond its own local supply. That acquisition campaign, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct it enabled (completed in 1913), is one of the most well-documented episodes in Western water history. Los Angeles didn't just acquire water rights -- it acquired the underlying land itself in large quantities, and the city, through what is now the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), has continued to hold much of that land ever since.

This wasn't a one-time purchase followed by resale -- LADWP has retained ownership of a large share of the Owens Valley floor for more than a century specifically to protect the watershed and water rights feeding the aqueduct, and in many cases leases the land for agricultural or grazing use rather than selling it. The practical effect for anyone searching for land here is that a great deal of what looks like ordinary rural valley-floor acreage is simply not on the market and never has been.

What is actually available -- and where to look

Private, buildable land in Inyo County is concentrated in and around the Highway 395 corridor towns: Bishop (the largest, near the base of the Eastern Sierra), Big Pine, Independence (the county seat), and Lone Pine. Even within and around these communities, confirm ownership carefully -- adjacent-looking parcels can differ dramatically between private fee-simple land, LADWP-owned land under agricultural or grazing lease, and federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, or National Park Service.

Beyond the valley floor, the county is dominated by two enormous blocks of federal public land not available for private purchase: Death Valley National Park to the east, and the Inyo National Forest (including Mount Whitney and extensive Sierra wilderness) to the west. This combination -- a narrow private/LADWP-held valley squeezed between two huge public-land blocks -- is what makes Inyo County so land-constrained despite its large total area.

Practical steps before searching for land here

Start with the Inyo County Assessor's parcel records to confirm ownership status before falling in love with a specific piece of ground -- LADWP and federal ownership are common enough here that assuming a rural parcel is privately owned and purchasable is a real mistake to avoid. If a parcel does turn out to be LADWP-owned, ask LADWP's Land Management Division directly whether any lease arrangement exists or whether the land has ever been offered for sale (this happens occasionally but is not the norm). And confirm with the Inyo County Planning Department early what zoning and water availability actually support on any private parcel you do find, since the valley's water history (see the dedicated well-water page) affects even privately held land.