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Comment by GaryNumanVevo | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered if it was possible for a company to just buy up a bunch of land and develop it however they wanted. If I recall, Google wanted to purchase land north of the 101 in Mountain View and put a giant bubble over the entire thing [1].

Not that I particularly trust Google to do a great job, but interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

[1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/02/23/google-r...

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Here's the model from coal "company towns" in the late 1800s/early 1900s: build town close to mine claim, far from any other town. Build company store in town. Fill it with necessities with huge markups. Offer credit for store items to employees. On payday (monthly), all credit owed to company store is taken from wages before you are given a paycheck. BTW, employees don't get paid an hourly rate. They get paid by how much coal they mine, and the company used fake weights when measuring how much coal you loaded each day to make it look like you loaded less than you did.

That's the whole scenario behind the song "Sixteen Tons". "Load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go. I owe my life to the company store."

Yeah kind of, but you have the most freedom when you do it in the middle of nowhere; Disney had a wide berth in Florida for example. It's pretty hard to do such things in already built-up areas.

There is a pretty big negative stigma from the early 1900s

IE Coal company towns and Fordlandia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-company-town/

Planned communities are definitely a thing, and have been tried many times. As I recall, they mostly end up as failures. It's difficult to design a utopia and have many other people than yourself agree.

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