Complex Numbers

No Clause for Celebration

My career was in urban/suburban planning, design and development -- so stories like this one are like candy to me.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/celebration-florida-how-disneys-community-of-tomor...

Celebration, Florida: How Disney’s ‘Community of Tomorrow’ Became a Total Nightmare
In 2004, Disney sold the downtown of utopian Celebration, Florida, to a private equity firm. Residents say it took their money and let the city rot around them.

The highly municipal-coded hamlet, built in 1995 to look like 1955, was billed as an antidote to the chain-ridden sprawl of suburban America. In Celebration, there were no fast-casual franchises, no hulking commercial trucks, no visual reminders of poverty. Every lawn was cut to code; every fence was freshly painted.

This is what we come up with for "utopia?" Count me the hell out.

Eventually, Kelly started selling Celebration real estate herself. “I wanted people to get it,” she said. “I didn’t want people coming to Celebration, particularly at that time, and going, ‘Oh this is cute.’ This is not cute. This is a fucking miracle.”

I don't think Disney would approve of your language, young lady.

But in 2016, when Kelly started a blog about Celebration called Cookie Kelly Blog, she wanted readers to get something else. Things in town had changed. The cracks in Celebration’s utopian façade had been evident for years: there were major segregation issues; the school, which didn’t assign homework, grades, or even books, was losing students by the dozens; the recession had bankrupted local businesses and pushed homes to foreclosure; and in one brutal week of 2010, the town experienced its first murder, followed by a police shootout with another man who barricaded himself in a house for 14 hours and shot himself in the head.

Okay, all of that is a bit much even for those of us who live for schadenfreude.

A third, the mother of three small girls, said her building often swayed beneath her feet. “Why?” she said. “Because the building leaked since 2008. The water has disintegrated the building, causing mold. The termites have come and gone. There’s nothing left for them to eat.“

Ah, the sweet, delicious tang of metaphor.

The intentional community was an experiment in New Urbanism, a neo-traditional planning movement that sought a return to early American small town life by designing compact, walkable cities with diverse housing options, mixed local businesses, and abundant public space.

I can say from experience that if you want both "compact, walkable cities" and "abundant public space," you might as well wish for fairy dust and a flying pony while you're at it, for all the good it'll do you. The two are incompatible, like Skittles and M&Ms.

Everything about Celebration telegraphed cozy familiarity. Brochures depicted a quasi-fantastical realm of home-cooked meals, traditional family values, and G-rated movies.

"The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." -John Milton

When Disney first laid out his plan for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, he painted it as a model of American capitalism. “EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world,” Disney said, “for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.” In a sense, it always has been—a corporate-built town constructed too quickly and too cheaply, sold off to unsuspecting owners under the guise of utopia while nurturing the same social issues that exist everywhere else.

And now, in 2020, the "ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise" mostly displays itself as private equity firms parasitically sucking the lifeblood out of corporations, giving nothing in return. The system is working as designed -- for the private equity firms.