Quote of the Day (Nick Bowlin, on ‘Contemporary Company Towns’)

“In my county in Colorado, a financier named Mark Walter has purchased seemingly half of Crested Butte’s main street. In Aspen, a Russian billionaire sued a local newspaper for describing him as an oligarch. At lower altitudes, there are plenty of strange new examples of powerful private financial interests operating in unusual jurisdictions: legislation that allowed Walt Disney World to be an essentially self-governing territory in Florida; Amazon’s soliciting enormous concessions from cities across the country in its search for a second headquarters; Elon Musk’s purchasing thousands of acres of land outside Austin, Texas, where he intends to incorporate a new town. Brian Highsmith, a fellow at Harvard Law School who studies corporate power and local government…describe[ed] these examples to me as contemporary company towns—now often achieved via extreme concentrations of property ownership that allow for private interests to gradually take hold of local democratic processes.”—High Country News journalist Nick Bowlin, “Letter From Big Sky: Slippery Slope: How Private Equity Shapes a Ski Town,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2024