The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  A trick or a treat? When Mickey comes calling. Halloween in Celebration. (Photo: the author)

  This broad range of sentiments was hardly surprising among pioneers who had been willing to entrust their life savings and their children’s education to the real estate aspirations of a huge entertainment company, and who had put their money down on the strength of silver-tongued advertising alone. I found there were few residents whose opinion of Disney did not shift rapidly in the early period of their settlement. Many wanted to hold on to what they often referred to as the “Disney dream,” but found it impossible to ignore the company’s profit-seeking priorities, its mania for secrecy, or its skittishness about tart publicity. Most surprising to me, the realization that this corporation is ruled by the bottom line came as a bitter revelation to Celebrationites, even though many of the same people said they had bought in “because everything Disney does turns to gold.”

  A chronic ambivalence developed. One nonresident who works in a downtown store summed up her attitude toward Disney. “Hate the company, like the employees.” More generally, there was the good Disney and the bad Disney, distinguishing Walt’s from Michael’s company. Residents also separated into two categories the many ranking employees who lived in town. There were “Disney types,” intimately associated with the company’s profile—aloof, tight-lipped, and close-to-the-chest—and there were “real people”—capable of switching off their corporate personalities when they were off the job. Most folks quickly learned that it was an asset to be associated with Disney in some matters and a liability in others. Despite the effective absence of Disney from the daily doings of the town, the company name was always a variable in how Celebrationites felt and talked about their home investment and the independent exercise of their rights, two quantities sometimes at odds with each other. To be sure, this was a peculiar environment for a brand name associated with fairy tales and fantasies without consequence. After all, there is nothing more consequential in America than the act of buying a home.

  UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  Home ownership is a sacred cornerstone of the American way. The percentage of Americans who own detached, single-family homes—the apex of social and economic life—far exceed those anywhere else in the world. Full membership in society can be attained only through entering into a long-term relationship with a banker, preferably through a mortgage. Americans are not fully citizens until they own a home, at which point their civic identity is anchored to their credit ratings and their property values. Non-debtors in the form of renters do not enjoy full privileges; they are regarded as immature, rootless, or untrustworthy. In addition, most homeowners are small traders because their homes are scarce assets likely to generate income through resale.3 Zoning and the regulation of land use determine what level of citizenship homeowners will enjoy. In the geography of suburbia, the status of residents tends to increase with the distance between home and work, as well as the distance from lower priced homes. In New Urbanist geography, the reverse is true; your status increases with proximity to work and to other homes corresponding to different income levels. But mixed-income and high-density housing in places like Celebration are still enormous risks to the ironclad patterns of predictability that command the housing industry and realty market. How easy it is to backslide. It took only a year or so in Celebration for the Phase Two lot plan for the North Village to revert to some elements of the conventional suburban pattern.

  Because New Urbanism marches to a different beat, the golden egg of resale value—predictability—is not guaranteed. Consequently, professional management must be as tight as a drum. What is the impact of this kind of management on the life of a place? Naturally, I wanted an answer from Andres Duany, the person who had thought longest and hardest about such questions. One spring evening, after his team completed their day’s work on the Orlando Naval Training Center proposal, I dined with Duany at Café D’Antonio, around the corner from my apartment. Our dinner conversation, he warned me, would be a dry run for a presentation he would give at an architects’ gathering at the Disney Institute the following day. Duany had staked his career on being provocative and being proved correct. He reeled off one success after another, as if methodically recounting a campaign of conquest for the New Urbanist cause. In his presentation the following evening, which took the form of a dialogue with Harvard professor Alex Krieger, he declared that all of the powerful bodies and institutions in the planning and housing world had been persuaded by the ideas of New Urbanism. There was one holdout—the elite academic citadels of instruction, like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, which remained antagonistic (one exception was Yale, where Robert Stern would be appointed to the deanship of the School of Architecture before the summer’s end). The task now at hand was to capture the Ivies. There is always a studied element of swagger in Duany’s showmanship, but no one had any reason to doubt the sincerity of his intentions.

  Duany had just purchased a lot in Celebration, in the Lake Evalyn pocket. Styled after Key West and hosting some charming Craftsmen cottages, Lake Evalyn was considered to have potential as an artsy, neo-bohemian quarter. Duany wanted to keep track of developments here and to observe for himself the slap-up job that Celebration’s creators had done. For twenty thousand dollars, he said, he was getting access to the “eight million dollars of R&D that had gone into the way the curbs are designed, the lamps they chose, the texture of the concrete.” (His contract on the lot was eventually dropped, after his firm lost the Naval Training Center competition). While our dinner conversation ranged widely, there was one provocative argument he wanted to pitch.

  [This place] is clearly governed by a corporation, rather than a government, and so what happens is that an American corporation is treating you as a customer. A customer is possibly treated better than a citizen in this country. If you look at the way Land’s End treats you, they’re open 24 hours a day. If you pick up the phone at Land’s End and see who answers, or here in Celebration, compared to who picks up in Miami at City Hall, and see what kind of illiterate hiring thing you get there—and I love minorities—but don’t tell me it’s the same quality of government.… If I show up at Coral Gables, I’m met essentially in an ugly room by an uninterested and harried bureaucrat who doesn’t care, and then I have to wait two weeks for a first appointment, where my building is critiqued by four or five government hacks, architects who got their position because of friendship with the mayor. What happens here when I have my building? I make a call, Joe Barnes shows up half an hour later, apologizing for being late, and this is a guy who went to Princeton and the University of Virginia who knows what he’s talking about. Objectively, that is a very superior experience. And I know they’re afraid of me because I’m a customer.… I must say I’m very interested in being a customer rather than a citizen. I’m wondering whether I would like to be treated as a customer at the level of the neighborhood and then as a citizen at the level of the county and country.

  I let Duany know there were many Celebrationites who felt they had been led to expect better customer treatment. In a complex community like this, you would be hard put to find a chorus of praise for the corporate offering of a “superior experience.” Besides, customers are only treated well if they can pay the bills or keep up with the assessments and mortgage payments. Otherwise, they are out of luck. Even here, in affluent Celebration, there was a cash-flow problem, as the town’s merchants could attest. The “maturing of the town,” he responded, would take care of that problem. For the time being, a secure grip was crucial. “In order to make a real place you actually have to control it,” he declared. “You have to manage it because there’s a tendency for things to become false, to become literally artificial.” Pushing aside his half-eaten pasta and gesturing toward the mixed range of stores around us, he praised TCC’s unbending devotion to market segmentation:

  If it takes a corporation, I’ll take a corporation. Because the free market will not sustain this. The free market would close thi
s down for T-shirts. The tourist economy or cultural economy is very destructive unless it’s managed. They will destroy Key West, they’ll destroy Nantucket. They’ll destroy the Left Bank of Paris, and eat Soho up. It takes something different, it takes a closed market, a managed market, to keep a normal place going.

  I had become quite familiar with Andres’s shtick, and considered myself something of a fellow traveler of New Urbanism, but there were moments like these that set me back. To my taste, the New Urbanist appetite for small-town civility often felt like a hunger for civic order at all costs. In the haste to see their designs adopted, any form of patronage would be considered: if the shoe fits, we will wear it, and whoever can supply the right size at the right price will win our loyalty. In like fashion, the modernists they scorned had gradually lost their passion for a new public order and increasingly turned to corporate patrons to bankroll their blueprints in the form of sleek office towers. New Urbanists had staked their first claims on the well-tended turf of private developers and private governments. Would they ever want to forgo the “superior experience” of dealing with expeditious, Princeton-trained peers for the public sluggishness of City Hall? In the Disney Institute debate with Krieger the next evening, the Harvard professor drew attention to the many fine “old urbanist” neighborhoods that were under stress in cities like Boston. In response, Duany suggested that a homeowner’s association would offer these districts better management and a better chance of rehabilitation than current forms of city government.

  Homeowner’s associations have proved an efficient and popular form of common-interest management, and by now they are a semi-permanent feature of the suburban landscape where planners like Duany have decided to operate. But the rage to embrace this form of governance and the willingness to salute a corporate monopoly—Duany’s “managed market”—troubled folks like myself for whom efficiency, civic order, and exacting management are not overriding goals in and of themselves. When planners accept these forms of management as the price for pushing their own architectural dreams, or as pragmatic compromises in the game of competing with suburban alternatives, some features of their hallowed ideal of civility, freely endorsed by all, are sacrificed. And when citizens are viewed primarily as consumers or as property holders, with no obligations beyond the protection of their own assets, an important line gets crossed.

  For one thing, some forms of civic disorder are crucial to the political life of the republic. Without civic disobedience, it has been proved, again and again, that there is little hope of changing unjust laws, discriminatory codes, and exclusive patterns of institutional behavior. The civil rights and life opportunities of a vast percentage of the population have been concessions won from the powerful only after prolonged opposition to the existing rules of civic order. Abiding suspicion of these rules is widespread, whether in the form of distrust of “white justice” or “upper middle class standards,” although such distrust is often vilified and blamed for the decline of everything from public manners to the upkeep of housing stock. Moralists see this resistance to civic order as a reflection of laziness and bad character, or as part of a general weakening of respect and refinement. But most of the time it is a result of friction generated between groups who have unequal resources and advantages. In addition, the pattern of most civic disorder reveals that “civility” usually covers a very narrow spectrum of tolerable behavior and is designed as much to exclude as to invite common participation. As if to compensate for all their good civic behavior, some Celebrationites wistfully conjured up a rough-and-ready presence in the streets. One day, as we were sharing a bench, and a slow day, on Market Street, a retiree, and an ex-military man at that, observed: “What we need are a few drunks around this town.”

  From what I had learned, most Celebrationites were attracted to the efficiency of private government. Many spoke to me of their loss of faith in public institutions and public government, and described democratic public process as laborious, wasteful, and inept. I always found this to be a circular argument, since the capacity of public institutions—especially urban ones—to function efficiently has been decimated by the siphoning away of resources brought about by the rise of suburban privatopias. Tax starvation is one of the reasons it takes a while for someone to answer Andres Duany’s phone call at City Hall in Miami. Besides, no one who has tried to be a fully functioning participant in a democratic process ever discovered it be truly efficient. Just and accountable, perhaps, but never the most economic use of time, energy, or resources. The rage for privatization that has swept the country, and much of the developed world, routinely sacrifices justice and accountability at the altar of efficiency. In practice, the efficiency of most forms of private governance is easily subverted, especially when its member-consumers take legal action. My own apartment in New York City belongs to a co-op, the most minimal form of common-interest development, and I had briefly served as vice president of the co-op board. It was an exhausting term of office, which often involved lengthy weekly meetings with lawyers when a mean-spirited set of residents repeatedly sued the co-op for weather damages to their apartment walls.

  As residents found out for themselves, the early, informal attempts at democratic opinion making in Celebration were a messy business, conducted discreetly or semi-publicly among interest groups that had formed around the town’s hot spots—primarily the school and home construction. Heedful of their potential labeling as “negative,” Celebrationites quickly became aware of the leverage they could command if they “went to the press” to publicly embarrass the company. In this capacity, they wielded a power unavailable to almost any another residential community. Celebration may have been tarred by association with the “Truman effect,” and certainly the media had generated no end of caricatures of residents who lived here. But townsfolk learned early on that the threat of media publicity could be their ally. Celebration was, and would always be, like the child of a famous public figure, basking in the warm glow of its birthright or suffering for the sins of its parent. Its private life could be ushered on to the public stage at any moment.4

  A STRANGE BEAST

  This blurring of lines between private and public eventually permeated everything that had come to interest me about this town. Celebration was a living, breathing embodiment of something called the private-public realm. This was a strange beast that had been slouching toward the millennium for much of the latter part of the century. With the end of the cold war, it picked up speed dramatically. More and more of what had been public sector was being turned over to private and corporate interests. With the spread of neoliberal economics around the globe, privatization had been urged on country after country. In comparison to other developed nations, the size of the public sector in the United States had always been modest. Now, open season was being declared on cherished holdouts like public schooling and Social Security.

  Housing has always been the preserve of private developers. The record of direct government involvement in housing is scanty and limited, for the most part, to forays like the New Deal’s Greenbelt towns (sold after the war in response to industry red-baiting), temporary wartime workers’ towns, and the overburdened programs of public housing that have hobbled along in the postwar years. On the other hand, the private housing sector is abundantly assisted by public funding in all sorts of ways. The postwar suburban explosion would not have been possible without the VA’s mortgage guarantee program, which helped tens of millions of Americans to buy a home. In addition, the annual tax benefits extended to homeowners amount to a huge portion of the public purse. Road and transportation funding is a direct subsidy to private developers and suburban homeowners. By the late 1980s, however, land was so expensive and income so polarized that the American Dream of home ownership had become a hard sell. In addition, the suburban culture of privacy and isolation, and the continuing slide in voter turnout, gave rise to widespread concerns about the erosion of public life and civic involvement among the general population.
Liberals’ alarm signals were set off by the flourishing of privatized exurban enclaves, while right-wing analysts like Charles Murray warned of a coming “custodial state” featuring “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population,” who will have become “permanent wards of the state.”5

  New Urbanism’s remedies promised to address some of the concerns about suburbia, at least. Who would take the gambit? Could any large private developers be persuaded to respond to the call to restore civic and community life, especially if it meant going against the grain of industry behavior? The chances seemed unlikely. Only a corporation like Disney—a company whose core business lay in culture and values—would feel it could benefit from taking on the challenge in a high-profile way. Only an entertainment company like Disney would be likely to see the fit between the values it sold and the traditional small-town virtues championed by New Urbanism.