TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new podcast “Dreamtown: The Story Of Adelanto” is a few small California desert city that turns to authorized hashish gross sales to attempt to revive its small financial system. Critic Nick Quah sees it as a worthy addition to a handful of podcasts he calls civic noir, analyzing small metropolis life, corruption and renewal.

NICK QUAH, BYLINE: It’s a picture straight out of an previous Western or the Bible. A small desert neighborhood finds itself getting ready to catastrophe when a stranger seems with a daring imaginative and prescient for the long run. The dream was realized, and for some time, issues had been good till they weren’t. In this case, the desert neighborhood is a tiny metropolis known as Adelanto, positioned simply north of the higher Los Angeles space. Like so many different locations within the United States, Adelanto was exhausting hit by the 2008 recession, and the town’s funds had been so dire it virtually went bankrupt in 2014. That’s when the stranger comes by means of. His title is John Woodard, however he goes by Bug. And the imaginative and prescient he brings is the dream of a contemporary gold rush – a authorized marijuana financial system.

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DAVID WEINBERG: Bug’s plan was to make Adelanto the primary metropolis in California to legalize industrial hashish cultivation, which, it seems, is a really tough and complex factor to tug off.

BETSY ZYKO: It’s exhausting to overstate how a lot riskier and extra harmful the hashish business is due to the inconsistency between federal and state regulation.

WEINBERG: But nonetheless, Bug continued. And his concept began to catch on with the remainder of the town.

JOHN BUG WOODARD: The wheels are in movement. Ain’t no one getting in the way in which. I do not care if you happen to’re the sheriff. I do not care if you happen to’re the governor. I do not care who you might be.

QUAH: Such is the setup for a restricted audio documentary collection known as “Dreamtown: The Story Of Adelanto,” the fascinating story of disaster and capital informed by means of the lens of a metropolis’s native politics. And simply to color an image of how native the story is, in his quest to show Adelanto right into a authorized weed hub, Bug runs for a seat on the town council and wins, spending solely $700 on the hassle. Adelanto’s wager on weed pays off to some extent. And the town’s funds start to enhance. But what begins out as a unusual story of financial redevelopment rapidly transforms into one thing else – a dense saga of shady actual property offers, zoning disputes and political corruption. Within just a few years, federal investigators turn into a typical sight within the metropolis.

“Dreamtown” suits neatly right into a rising podcast subgenre that digs into the drama and oddities of metropolis lore. The vibe is a form of civic noir, exemplified lately by podcasts like “California City,” which recounts the story of one other false fortune in a desert, “Crooked City,” which continues the documentarian Marc Smerling’s curiosity in organized crime making the leap into native authorities, and “Boomtown,” a few small West Texas metropolis’s transformation by the oil business. These reveals collectively seize an anxious, melancholic feeling across the fragility of native democracies, continually susceptible to forces past their management. That melancholia pervades “Dreamtown” as nicely.

The collection is reported and hosted by David Weinberg, a veteran radio journalist. His greatest work, the nonfiction anthology collection “Welcome To LA,” is stuffed with tales about odd characters constructing colourful lives in and round Southern California. In some ways, “Dreamtown” is a continuation of that mission, with its eager curiosity within the those who make up Adelanto and the way in which their lives are reworked by the bigger shifts round them. Weinberg has a definite model – quiet, observant, wry. He has an exquisite eye for vivid imagery, which he interprets into evocative scenes written for the ear.

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WEINBERG: Tim is in his 60s, collared costume shirt and a vape pen in hand as he navigated the poorly paved streets of Adelanto. In the gap are the peaks of the Angeles National Forest. All round us, Joshua bushes had been sticking up out of the bottom. And alongside the aspect of the highway had been bulldozers flattening the land for the foundations of the huge warehouses that may quickly be stuffed with weed.

QUAH: That understated method serves the fabric nicely, given how ornate and weird issues can get in “Dreamtown.” One episode, for instance, traces the story of one other Adelanto metropolis councilmember, Jermaine Wright, whose time in authorities ended with a federal jail sentence for taking a bribe to assist open a hashish enterprise whereas additionally making an attempt to commit insurance coverage fraud by hiring somebody to burn down his personal restaurant.

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WEINBERG: So Jermaine gave this faux electrician a tour of his restaurant. They set a date for the hearth, and Jermaine paid him the cash for the job. And it was truly form of a steal. Apparently, it solely prices 1,500 bucks to burn down somebody’s restaurant, at the very least, , if you happen to’re paying an FBI agent to do it. But earlier than the scheduled torching, the FBI confirmed as much as the restaurant with a search warrant. And they interviewed Jermaine, and he confessed.

QUAH: There is commonly a fable-like high quality to “Dreamtown,” which speaks to the considerably archetypal nature of Adelanto’s predicament. Across the United States, there are numerous different rural cities grappling with some type of the identical financial quandaries and moral temptation. “Dreamtown” would possibly look like a Coen Brothers-esque caper, but it surely’s essentially a narrative about what a metropolis represents, the varieties of people that really feel drawn to combat for its preservation and what can occur once you make a cope with forces you are not fairly ready to grapple with. Whether a fable or cautionary story, one factor’s for positive. It’s a deeply American story.

MOSLEY: Nick Quah is a podcast critic for New York Magazine and Vulture. He reviewed “Dreamtown: The Story Of Adelanto,” from Crooked Media. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, award-winning actor Richard E. Grant joins us to speak about his new memoir, “A Pocketful Of Happiness,” which chronicles his 35-year marriage to the late acclaimed dialect coach to the celebrities Joan Washington. I hope you’ll be able to be part of us. To sustain with what is going on on with the present and to get highlights of our interviews, comply with us on Instagram at @NPRFreshAir.

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MOSLEY: FRESH AIR’s government producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. A particular thanks to Conor Anderson for engineering this present from WDET in Detroit. Our interviews and critiques are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Ann Marie Baldonado, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the present. For Terry Gross, I’m Tonya Mosley.

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