The USA Water Polo National Aquatic Center[6] is located on the Joint Forces Training Base - Los Alamitos.

William Andrews Clark, a future Senator from Montana, had built his fortune in mining, banking and logging in that state.

His younger brother, J. Ross Clark, managed their operations in California after he moved to that state for health reasons.

Lewellyn Bixby, whose family owned the surrounding land on the Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos, had been trying to build a sugar beet factory in that area for a few years but, due to financial losses in the 1880s, he no longer had the financial capital to undertake the sugar beet factory complex on his own.

After making an additional fortune from selling wool to the government during the Civil War, the Flints and Bixby bought up many properties in Southern California.

One was the future Irvine Ranch and another was the Rancho Los Cerritos which makes up much of the western half of Long Beach.

When Flint, Bixby broke up Lewellyn assumed their Southern California properties and moved to Los Angeles and became the senior partner in his operations with his brother Jotham.

John W. put together a consortium of himself, his cousins Lewellyn and Jotham (owners of Rancho Los Cerritos) and banker I.W.

The community that grew up around this new sugar beet factory complex—with its streets of company houses for workers and surrounding farms—came to be called Los Alamitos.

(As part of his arrangement to build and operate the sugar beet factory, William Clark and his brother H. Ross, who actually ran the Los Alamitos operation, also received 1,000 acres east of the factory and a year later completed a purchase of 8,000 acres (32 km2) of land north of the sugar plant—most of the latter in the Rancho Los Cerritos boundaries—that would eventually become the Long Beach Airport, Long Beach City College, and the city of Lakewood.

Economics and an elimination of a protective tariff, combined with an insect infestation in 1921, caused sugar-beet crop to drop significantly in Orange County and the eventual demise of the sugar beet industry there and in Los Alamitos.

Bixby, one of the more progressive ranchers of his time, allowed European immigrant, Mexican, and Japanese farmers to rent the land and grow crops.

At the beginning of World War II, the Japanese farmers were rounded up by the military and relocated to internment camps at Manzanar and elsewhere.

Just prior to and during early World War II, the area around Los Alamitos became a major center for the aircraft industry.

At the same time the Navy decided it needed an auxiliary airfield for its Reserve Training facility at the increasingly crowded Airport.

In February 1941, the Navy decided to move all their reserve aviation training from Long Beach and purchased what would become a 1300-acre facility.

The Navy moved out in 1972 and in 1973, the California National Guard took over management of the base, re-designated an Armed Forces Reserve Center.

Today, it is a reserve support center for units of the Army, Navy, National Guard and Marines, but is also a home to many other government agencies, including Homeland Security, FEMA and the State of California Office of Emergency Services.

[11] Many former military personnel chose to stay on in Los Alamitos after the war, living in such new neighborhoods as Carrier Row, where streets are named for World War II aircraft carriers, many of which had been the home for Navy pilots trained at Los Alamitos.

These homes had sewage problems, and the builder stopped after completing only the two blocks east of Lexington and south of Katella.

In 1956 builder Ross Cortese purchased land to build the walled community of Rossmoor just southwest from the townsite of Los Alamitos.

Rossmoor, still the largest single development in Orange County, was the first walled community in the United States and quickly became home to over 10,000 upper middle class professionals.

Prior to Rossmoor, Choate and May had worked with Cortese on building the nearby Lakewood Rancho Estates in Long Beach.

The small city has been the hometown for a number of noted athletes including baseball Hall of Famer Bob Lemon(although he spent more time in Long Beach), and Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby.

[12] The city shares a northwestern border with Los Angeles County's Long Beach, namely the El Dorado Park neighborhood.

According to the 2010 United States Census, Los Alamitos had a median household income of $80,449, with 7.2% of the population living below the federal poverty line.