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ndrosenOn Wednesday, August 19, Dr. Fred Foldvary spoke about Walt Disney World as a Proprietary Rent-Funded Community. You can click on the link and read what he himself wrote about the matter.
There are other examples of proprietary rent-funded communities, like shopping malls, hotels, the private neighborhoods of St. Louis, Missouri, a condominium in Alexandria, Virginia, etc. You don't pay a fee to use the elevator in a hotel; you pay rent on your room, which finances services Ike the elevator.
WDW is like that on a bigger scale; it occupies forty square miles in Orange and Osceola counties (mostly Orange), and has 70,000 "cast members." The land assembly was done through dummy corporations, with $5 million paid for 28,000 acres, and the price around $180 per acre by 1964. When it was learned that it was Disney buying the land, the price climbed to $1000 per acre. There is something called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, 98% of which is owned by Disney, which enabled to use innovative methods. This is not like Disney Land in California, where the hotels and such outside the theme park are privately owned. Disney World mostly does not enrich privat land speculators. Disney Land does, and the frenzy of land speculation raised land prices, and made it hard to actually build the hotels required to make the theme park viable.
There are other examples of proprietary rent-funded communities, like shopping malls, hotels, the private neighborhoods of St. Louis, Missouri, a condominium in Alexandria, Virginia, etc. You don't pay a fee to use the elevator in a hotel; you pay rent on your room, which finances services Ike the elevator.
WDW is like that on a bigger scale; it occupies forty square miles in Orange and Osceola counties (mostly Orange), and has 70,000 "cast members." The land assembly was done through dummy corporations, with $5 million paid for 28,000 acres, and the price around $180 per acre by 1964. When it was learned that it was Disney buying the land, the price climbed to $1000 per acre. There is something called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, 98% of which is owned by Disney, which enabled to use innovative methods. This is not like Disney Land in California, where the hotels and such outside the theme park are privately owned. Disney World mostly does not enrich privat land speculators. Disney Land does, and the frenzy of land speculation raised land prices, and made it hard to actually build the hotels required to make the theme park viable.
