On paper, the outcome was a win-win situation. There was little financial risk involved, since the company already owned the land, secretly bought for a song (about $180 an acre) back in 1967, and it had done its consumer market research among the target homeowners groups. The company also stood to benefit enormously from the land, road, and environmental entitlements secured through the Celebration plan. Disney would take credit for building a showcase public realm in a suburban landscape bereft of public life. Credit might even accrue to the general cause of corporate America, beset by criticisms of its greed and disregard for the common good. Privatizers would be able to contend that public interests can indeed be favorably served by private enterprise. Celebration promised visible proof that corporations could be entrusted with the charge of restoring public space. If successful, the example of this town would be a formidable weapon in the arsenal of free-marketeers who believe that putting a price on everything is the best way of preserving the common interest.
Skeptics abounded. The teeming army of Disney-bashers sharpened their bayonets. Each inkling of “trouble in paradise” that filtered out of Celebration was scooped up and magnified into a macabre tale of Mickey Mouse misadventures. The Wonderful World of Disney, it was concluded early on, was not a hospitable climate for real people; this time, it was repeatedly predicted, the company had bitten off more than it could chew.
On the ground, I had found that things were a good deal more complex. The development team had got a lot of things right in the design of the town, and had frontloaded the community plan with the best intentions. Like all real estate developers, its puffed-up advertising and sales brochures set improbable expectations, but unlike any other developer, its brand name bought instant credibility from prospective buyers. The communitarian ethos lured community builders, and the school’s innovative learning design enthralled boomer parents looking for something different. Competent management professionals took up positions in Town Hall and at the Foundation.
Barely two years from the first occupancy, Celebration had prematurely aged, such was the turmoil the community had lived through. Virtually every member of the development team within TCC and the school had departed, and Disney no longer had an unambiguous brand-name attachment to the town. Any resident or merchant could tell you the town’s three problem spots: schooling, home construction, and shopping. The public-private partnership behind the school was fraught from the beginning. Equity requirements of the public school system clashed with the extraordinary resources demanded by the learning design and with many of the residents’ expectations of entitlement. The educational methods had produced stirring results, but not in the form that most parents wanted. The downtown retail sector, built to provide an animated public space, and administered by what Duany called a “managed market,” had also proved an ordeal for many of the merchants, and had risked alienating residents’ sense of proprietary rights to the town. Its streets were busy enough, attracting visitors from near and far, but the boutique retail content had been a hard sell. The quality of housing construction had suffered from the chain of subcontracting, which allowed each agent in the chain—developer, builders, and subcontractors—to disown responsibility for supervision and for delivering what had been advertised.
As these concerns had developed, spinning media headlines along the way, Disney management took a deep, dread-lined breath, and then stepped back. The golden rule of stockholder reassurance had kicked in, and residents and merchants felt the shift of mood, as if a new weather pattern had settled into the air around them. All of a sudden, the community creators had gone and the business managers, taking their cues from Burbank, were running the show from a dispassionate distance. The new policy was clear-cut. Celebration had been planned as a real community, and so it would have to stand on its own to prove its authenticity. Some residents felt abandoned, nervous about their investment in poor housing stock, and distressed about a school they felt was inadequate. Others saw a frank opportunity to take more control over the destiny of the town and organized their interests accordingly. In the meantime, the town—judged by the criterion of real estate sales—was proving a commercial success.
All of this had happened much sooner and much more boisterously than anyone bargained for. In my time there, I watched as some kind of provisional public sphere, built on blunt opinion, common sentiment, and the stoic pursuit of civic needs, pushed its snout into the moist Florida air. It was fresh, cranky, and fraught with all the noble virtues and sorry prejudices that contend in the republic at large. Kindled by self-interest, and fiercely mindful of the property values of the developer and residents alike, this public awareness was raised to a new pitch by the ever-present performance anxiety. Born and nurtured in the cool radiance of media scrutiny, the community was hooked on self-inspection. From the rumor mill to the formal caucus, residents themselves played their part. Self-surveillance of the town’s progress and accomplishments was almost a built-in feature of community life. The result sometimes felt like uncharted terrain for life in a democracy. People would speak and act because they had to prove to themselves that they were free to do so, all the while knowing that any public angst could turn into a private liability.
If this was a new way of behaving, the conduct of the private and public institutions involved did not seem to have altered that much. Disney would go on doing what Disney does, as a private corporation devoted to its quarterly returns, and the community managers would hit the hard road toward civic stability, in search of a tolerable balance of residents’ and developer’s needs. The municipal incorporation of Celebration, if it happened, would probably result in a contract city, as close to a state of private management as was legally permissible. The practice of the corporation itself had not been modified by its experiment with town building. If anything, the lessons of Celebration may have inclined Disney to think twice about any future foray into the public domain. Other developers who took the town as an industry benchmark were likely to plan well below the expectations set by Celebration, reasoning that they could not afford the full menu of infrastructure and community software that had gone into the town’s design.
On the other side, had the behavior of public institutions altered as a result of their participation in this town? Osceola County planners were sick and tired of taking calls about Celebration, and told me so. County managers were gratified with the lucrative addition to their tax rolls, and with the hope of high-end growth and development, but remained just as ineffectual in coping with the throng of minimum-wage residents and the traffic surplus that Disney would continue to attract to the region in increasing volume. The school board had inherited an educational model that none of its members seemed to regard as very practical, or desirable, to replicate. As for the state planning and environmental agencies, they had settled on living with a growth management policy, of the sort exemplified by the Celebration agreements, that ran the risk of awarding high moral credibility to Florida’s runaway developers. Ravagers of the state’s remaining pristine acreage could now go about their business wearing an environmental badge of honor. Increasingly starved of resources by antigovernment politics and resigned, by professional habit, to merely responding to private developer initiatives, these agencies were in no better position to act creatively and effectively in the public interest. City planners, on the other hand, could see an appreciable rise in their own prestige, and perhaps even their power, as a result of each and every New Urbanist development like Celebration.
The lessons of Celebration, drawn out in scale, suggest that any restoration of trust in these institutions, both corporate and government, requires a sea change in their character. Why rely on corporate goodwill to sustain public initiatives if executives back off whenever their company’s brand name is threatened by dubious publicity? Corporations with quasi-governmental powers do not inhabit a quarantined private sector. In an age when government gives more rights to corporations than it does to people, we cannot forget tha
t corporations were once state-chartered entities, with carefully limited powers to protect against their abuse of citizens’ rights. The “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, introduced to protect the rights of freed slaves, allowed corporations to claim the same status before the law as any natural person and opened the door toward deregulation of their activities. As late as 1913, some states affirmed their right to revoke charters when corporations failed to act in the public interest, but the habit of invoking the First Amendment privilege to protect the “speech” of corporations had already taken a severe toll on public life, and would continue to do so.
The right to revoke these charters should be invoked more often to educate executives in their public obligations. One or two MBA courses in business ethics are not enough. The economic conduct of corporations is in dire need of reform. Because of its size and scope of activities, Disney is as good an example as any. With one hand, the company was accepting praise for its high-profile sponsorship of Celebration’s model of urbanity. With another, it was busy recruiting foreign nationals willing to labor for a minimum wage that buys much less than it did thirty years ago. All the while, it was turning a blind eye to the uncounted Asian factory workers toiling over its T-shirts and toys for starvation wages. This is not publicly minded policy, nor is it intended to be. It is the intolerable face of capitalism with no footing in humane conduct, rewarding the affluent and punishing the poor.
On the other side, public agencies, which we need more than ever, must be funded sufficiently to pursue innovations of their own, especially in the business of housing and shelter. Their current handmaiden function is all too often limited to housekeeping regulation, ensuring legal compliance, or indirectly subsidizing private ventures. Would Celebration have been a better place if, like its British counterpart, the marble-flintstone-and-chalk Poundbury of Leon Krier and Prince Charles, it included public housing? Many residents would applaud such a move, and it would help to soften the town’s elitist profile around Central Florida.
Should the state once again become actively involved in town making? It has been almost thirty years since government dabbled in the business of community building, supporting civic-friendly alternatives to the rapacious practices of merchant subdivision builders.6 At the high watermark of federal involvement in the early 1970s, HUD created a New Town Corporation to fund as many as 110 new towns for a population of 20 million. The initiatives were hit hard by the insolvencies of the 1974 oil crisis, and by urban mayors’ protests that federal housing money should be invested instead in more pressing inner-city needs. Many communities defaulted on their federally guaranteed loans. Shortly thereafter, President Ford pulled federal government out of community building, never to return. In the face of the destructive social impact of urban disinvestment in the 1970s and 1980s, it became politically regressive to advocate state funding for building new, relatively upscale communities on undeveloped rural land. New towns of this sort, it was concluded, would not address the chronic character of America’s social and environmental problems, and would benefit only the least needy. Henceforth, federal dollars would flow only to more indigent, rural, and urban communities.7 This was sound policy, but it came at a price. With government out of the picture, the suburban secessionists had an easier time removing themselves from any responsibilities, fiscal or social, to the broader public. In the absence of any public stake in their affairs, such communities were more likely to pull their own stake from public affairs at large.
The recent acclaim for New Urbanism at several government agencies, and in state and local planning departments, is in part an expression of welcome relief at seeing civic alternatives emerge from a private suburban sector that had been written off as a source of social innovations. Yet most advocates of New Urbanism will say that planners are simply not in a position to address the major social ills of America in their designs. Their primary aim is to break the industry formula for cranking out anonymous subdivisions and prestige, golf-course communities, and to do so by working from the inside out. New Urbanist towns are “commentaries” on urban problems, they do not provide a solution to them. Before I took up residence in Celebration, Bob Stern warned me against looking for such large-scale solutions and advised me simply to compare the town to what was on offer nearby, in comparable exurban developments. To be sure, I found that most residents had migrated from such places, and regardless of the degree of their passion for the romance of Celebration, attested to the basic betterment of their lives in the new town. But this was only a small part of the story that I witnessed, and not the most telling.
Rudely dispossessed of any lingering illusions that they had moved to an instant utopia, Celebrationites encountered obstacles to happiness that compelled them to forge community bonds for which there was no planning blueprint. The strong community its creators had hoped for would come into being as much in response to adversity as to the conveniences and advantages built in the town’s design. The sense of community that was most authentic and resourceful emerged in response to perceived threats, challenges, and barriers to people’s well-being, and, above all, to their property values. This spirited mood, as fractious as it was cohesive, was charged by the energies released by foiled expectations of the packaged good life. Interests beyond their control, whether commercial (the developer), philosophical (the school), or cultural (media and outsider opinion), had imperiled Celebrationites’ sense of security. It had taken the bitter taste of jeopardy to arouse the appetite for strong society. That was another lesson I would take away from Celebration.
What these residents would do with their strong community was another matter. Donna Sines, director of Osceola County’s enormously successful Community Vision project (150 citizens’ focus groups were playing a role in planning the county’s future), was one of the many incredulous locals who laughed heartily when I described the conditions of adversity that Celebrationites felt they faced on a daily basis. Sines, whose office space is donated by Tupperware and sits in the back of that company’s sprawling headquarters on Orange Blossom Trail, had participated in the ACT community health project in Celebration. She recalled that while some of the other communities in the project, like St. Louis, or Bethel, Illinois, had been battling teenage pregnancies, drug addictions, prostitution, and neighborhood decay, Celebration’s primary social problem appeared to be weight control. An active official in the tornado relief effort earlier in the year, Sines admitted that she had not thought, at the time, of appealing to Celebrationites for money and food. She simply assumed they “would not be interested.” All the same, Sines said she was “looking forward to the day when there is some overspill of Celebration’s leadership potential, when all the energies of these Type A personalities starts to flow into the county.”
It was a heartfelt wish, though there was more wistful hope than bright expectation in her voice. Upscale communities with strong, internal bonds have a record of looking after their own interests, rather than investing their energies outside of town limits. The suburban tax revolts of the late 1970s in southern California set a model that the Sunbelt communities have been quick to follow.8 Persuaded that their property taxes are being squandered on public services to the “undeserving poor,” affluent communities often seek to incorporate in order to capture their own tax revenue, further distancing their members from any regional responsibilities. I had already heard resentful talk among residents about the county’s reliance on Celebration’s tax base to look after its local “transients” and “deadbeats.” Municipal rule would not alter the county’s share of its tax base, but it would give townspeople control over their own fiscal identity. Outsiders who like to refer snidely to Celebration as a Disney “police state” will no doubt applaud if and when its residents vote to incorporate. But how will the municipal powers be used? To further seal the town off from the region’s service worker population, or to integrate itself into the fabric of the county by serving as a resourceful public leader?
I had worried that my own stay in Celebration might be premature. New towns take decades to ripen, and the habit and custom that grows from residential use of a place can be a slow process of fermentation. Future authors would provide a mellowed assessment. More to the point, residents, weary of being written about, would surely publish their own biographies of the town. But it had been a formative year for Celebration, still in raw transition from a glassy Potemkin village, gussied up for media consumption, to a complex community of pioneers with their own history of residence to reflect on. What were often described around town as growing pains turned into decisive experiences that would affect the shape of the community for many years to come. The tumult within the community would not subside for some time, while media scrutiny of the town would probably never let up. But the timing of my stay had felt right. Pioneers could still recall the original vision of its creators, but its legacy was fading fast. Townspeople often remarked that they wanted to see a proper book about this phase of Celebration, before the early memories were paved over and before the official, airbrushed narratives took hold.
Near the end of my stay, one of the residents dissatisfied with the school asked me if I would consider being the headmaster of a new school in Celebration. I was often asked whether I had decided to stay there permanently. Naturally, I was pleased that people saw me as someone who had played a role in the town. By contrast, friends and colleagues in New York had predicted that life in Celebration would scare the living daylights out of me. One referred to my place of residence as Hellebration. Another assured me that I was living in a concentration camp. Elder siblings, comfortably ensconced with their families in upper-middle-class residential surroundings, hoped my stay would finally dispel the bohemian delusions of their forty-something brother and inspire him to settle down in the real world. My mother, bless her soul, kept mum.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 38
