I’d predict that if there were many for-profit cities most people would be okay with them, as they’d be reluctant to move to worse-run non-profit cities.
This reminds me of Spencer Heath, whose descendant wrote,
Spencer Heath once reasoned that if a new town were developed under unified ownership and its land parceled among the occupants by means of long-term land leasing rather than subdivided in fee, we would have an entrepreneurial community in principle very much like a hotel carried out-of-doors and writ large. In light of both the size and the complexity of many contemporary hotels, Heath’s suggestion that hotels might be viewed as prototypes of cities of the future is far more credible today than when he wrote sixty years ago. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas promotes itself as a self-contained city, and it does approach a truly generalized community. It includes shopping malls, professional offices, convention facilities, restaurants and cafes, chapels, theaters and art galleries, medical services, a security force, a monorail station, and the list goes on. It is significantly larger — counting room guests, service staff and visitors — than was the city of Boston at the time the United States gained its independence from England.
He terms this manorialism. What Hanson proposes is a way of getting from here to there–of having cities sell their land and the right to enact rules to a private buyer.
Hanson writes as if the current owners of a city are those who currently own its property. That does not take into account the teachers’ union, which acts as if it owns the county where I live. Given the political power that the union exercises, it could hold hostage any sale of the sort that Hanson contemplates.
Look at what the Howard Huges Corp is doing to the South Street Seaport in NYC. Even after a major setback from Hurricane Sandy, it is quite incredible what they are doing for the neighborhood (which they own most of).
Supports the above claim.
Ideas also are entitled ownership. Union powers is an example. Why does the left pick acceptable oppression groups?
How, exactly, do you think things would change if there weren’t a teachers union? You’d still have a large number of government employees living in the same town as you, with the same objections that unions would have to such a sale (presumably).
One of the huge mistake union opponents make is to think that the unions are the cause, rather than the exercise, of power. Go ask Rahm how that worked.
And you’ll have to tell me why you think teachers’ opposition would be any greater than that formed by cops, who are more expensive both in pensions and disability (and have shorter careers), firefighters (ditto) or, in fact, DMV workers.
I get your general point, of course. Just not sure why you think teachers unions are going to be the ones blocking utopia.
Where I live, I am most impressed by the political determination and power of teachers’ unions. Other interest groups operate, but the teachers are the most formidable.
It is easy to give people power, difficult to have them relinquish it.