Bill Gates plunked down $80 Million to buy 25,000 acres in Arizona to build a model city.
It will incorporate his ideas about how the world ought to be.
It is less than an hour from Phoenix.
He will call it Belmont.
470 acres will be set aside for public schools. I wonder which charters will be invited to run those “public schools.”
The big unanswered question: Will he live there?
Or is this just another opportunity to try out a bold idea that he had on the treadmill one morning?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Maybe he will invite Eva to run the school.
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Will be interesting to see how the planned city and its high tech infrastructure is supported and maintained throughout the years, when it’s no longer shiny and new.
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Arizona is a racist oligarchy controlled by white supremacists, and might as well be its own nation-state. Why did Bill Gates select that state for his social experiment and how racially diverse will the population of the town he built and owns be?
I wonder if these facts have anything to do with it.
According to the US Census, Arizona is 83.3 percent “white alone”,
4.9 percent black,
5.4 percent American Indian
3.4 percent Asian
The Hispanic or Latino population ratio makes no sense. How can they be 30.9 percent when it clearly says “white alone” is 83.3 percent?
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/AZ
Bill Gates must think Arizona is the perfect place to have an experiment that only focuses on a mostly “white alone” population in addition to the racist white controlled oligarchy that rules Arizona. After all, Arizona is where the racist former sheriff Joe Arpaio struggles to overcome his constipation each morning.
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Excellent, Lloyd. Thank you.
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Gee I kinda liked Sedona . EASY
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In every state, there is a liberal fortress somewhere. Most of them are cities. For instance, Texas.
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Right on, Lloyd!
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I think this is a cool. Starting with a clean slate is often the best way to test ideas.
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What’s “clean” about a city owned by the man with arguably the dirtiest hands in the world? (I realize that’s a tight contest.)
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The scariest thing, Dienne, is that compared to some of our younger tech overlords, like the creepy, cyborg-like Mark Zuckerberg, the Evil Gnome Bezos, or the beyond-awful Peter Thiel (“Germany’s worst import to the US”), Gates is almost a liberal humanist. (shudder)
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I dunno. Those guys may end up doing more damage in the long run, but Gates has had a hell of a running start on them. They’re going to have to work hard to outdo the man who has almost single-handedly undermined global health and education.
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Bring on the precogs! (from Minority Report)
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“I wonder which charters will be invited to run those “public schools.””
Is Gates a charter proponent? I’m not sure he is exactly. I don’t think he cares about who controls schools as long as they use his technology. In fact, I think he actually prefers real public schools because it’s easier to deal with one government entity than dozens of private entities. I could be wrong.
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In fact, I’m very interested to know what these schools will look like. Are they going to be like Lakeside Academy where he sent his own kids, in order to cater to the upscale crowd? Are they going to be cubicle warrens full of computers to plug the products, er, I mean, students into in order to push his products? Or are there going to be two different kinds of schools – those for kids of the professionals and those for kids of the maids?
Anyway, a city owned and controlled by one man. What could go wrong?
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This sounds like a dystopia in the making…something out of Orwell or Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We.”
Or may even a hell on earth. In either case, hard pass from this corner.
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Why am I suddenly thinking of Camazotz?
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And why am I suddenly thinking of Wayward Pines?
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Love!
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Camazotz. Had to look that one up. LMAO. Yes!
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Belmont? Wonder if it will have a race track?
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If Gates wants to be a forward thinker, he might consider building his city under ground. If the temperatures keep climbing, subterranean construction in the desert makes sense. There is already one such city in the outback of Australia. http://metro.co.uk/2015/05/28/theres-a-whole-town-in-australia-that-lives-underground-5219091/
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Not to mention the fact that this town will need access to water?….not much water in the desert!
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Gates will probably buy the water rights from someone that owns them. The Colorado River has an old, outdated history of water rights legislation that goes back to the late 19th or early 20th century. For some people, if you own land next to the river that goes with those water rights, you control the water flowing past that land.
Because of that, in recent years, corporations have been buying those rights as close to the headwaters as possible so they can profit from them. Some communities that are closer to the headwaters that have had free access to the water are suddenly being charged by for-profit private sector businesses that now own the rights. That water used to be a public resource but that flow of water is now being taken over by the for-profit private sector businesses just like the robbery of our public schools. And if I recall correctly, hedge fund managers are part of this.
Maybe Bill Gates already bought the water rights he needs and then he can subvert water that was going to someone else through the public sector.
This report from NPR might shed some more light on what’s going on with that water.
https://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2003/aug/water/part2.html
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In Tucson, they suck the water out of ancient reservoirs in the ground.
If you go deep enough, you can always get water.
But of course, it’s not sustainable.
But then nothing else that Gates does is either.
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Water rights have a long history of conflict in the West, where water is scarce. Ripparion rights laws from the East of this country would not have worked in the West.
The West developed laws that were essentially “first in time, first in rights.”
Whoever had the original claim to the water in a river or stream, owned those rights in perpetuity and they could be passed on to his heirs or sold.
This has led to a whole lot of problems, and major conflicts between neighboring states, as well.
Not to mention the fact that the aquifer out West keeps getting lower and lower because they are drawing too much water from it.
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As Mark Twain supposedly said about the West, “Whiskey’s for drinking and water is for fighting over.”
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Retired
I’m sure you are not the only one who would like to see Bill under ground.
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I know this sounds terrible…..6 feet under or flames licking your feet under?
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Well, he is building his own personal “ant” farm.
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“Belmont” –what an insipid name, and so ill-suited to Arizona. Connotes misty English manor, not Sonoran desert.
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Since it is going to be so hot, perhaps Hades is a better name.
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Re. WATER
Read “Where the Water Goes” by David Owen, Riverhead Press.
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Or Mark Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert.”
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Sounds like an adult version of Sim City.
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Why does the term “company town” come to mind?
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Well, there is this:
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This is creepy. Belmont is the name of the fictitious town representing the new white upper class in Charles Murray’s 2012 book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Yes, the same Charles Murray who wrote the controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve.”
Here’s one review where it makes an interesting observation: Murray used the name Belmont which is the name of the Massachusetts town where Mitt Romney lived for 30 years! You can’t make this stuff up!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/02/10/belmont_in_charles_murray_s_coming_apart_does_he_get_it_right_.html
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Belmont was the name Charles Murray used to describe a certain type of new upper class community in his book, Coming Apart. Murray has had distasteful views on IQ related to race and SES, but I found this book to be a mostly interesting read on the phenomenon of adults self-selecting and self-stratifying in communities, according to income and education level.
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Whoa! So Gates is going to engineer a town of superior ants!
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The idea of self-selection and self-stratifying is quite disingenuous. Sure, affluent whites self-select and self-stratify, but that’s because they have the option to do so. Poor people and people of color don’t self-select or self-stratify. They go where they can afford to go and where they are allowed to go. This has been a result of a long history of deliberate policies implemented by the government, banks and other corporations. To pretend that poor people and people of color voluntarily “self-stratify” into ghettos is insulting, racist and classist. Just like Charles Murray and Bill Gates.
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I agree, Dienne.. De facto segregation in housing has long been goin on, for economic reasons, for racist reasons, and the idea that people of color and poor people willingly choose to live in sub-standard housing so they can be with others like themselves is indeed racist, classist, and yes, insulting.
We still get the de facto segregation of schools, as well, largely because of the housing segregation.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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Point accepted. I used his wording to describe his thesis. As I read his book, his data observations resonated with me, but not his interpretation of the observation.
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Didn’t Disney do this already?
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I was thinking that as well.
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I reckon Westworld was taken …
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Utopian planning has a long history, but this development appears to be little more than a money making venture, overhyped by the press. The tract of land is not far from a nuclear plant, and there are some serious issues of water supply for a development of this scale,
Read this version of the project.
https://slate.com/business/2017/11/bill-gates-smart-city-in-arizona-is-not-smart-not-a-city-and-has-almost-nothing-to-do-with-bill-gates.html
Also if you want to see how a billionaire actually wants to live, look at this report on the home of Bill and Melinda Gates
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/nation-world/peek-inside-bill-gates-124-million-mansion-xanadu-2-0/take-a-look-at-bill-gates-new-house/slideshow/56019670.cms
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I like how that first link tries to pretend Bill has nothing to do with the project – he just wants to profit off it, of course. But if there’s something that Bill wants to profit off of but not control, I’ll eat my hat.
The second link is positively nauseating.
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The thing I don’t get about Gates house is that it looks like a haphazzard fort put up by a bunch of kids.
You’d think that with all of his money, he could find an architect who knows how to design an aesthetically pleasing house.
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I hope Bill is so busy with his new project, he forgets all about trying to remake public education.
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That would be great – that the Gate to Hell would forget about his war against community-based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools with teachers that belong to labor unions.
The Gate probably has teams at work on each project he ordered started, and those teams and their bosses know they have to deliver what The Gate wants or they could lose their jobs.
It’s always about money with these people.
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“Billmont City”
Billmont city
Ain’t it pretty?
Built from hills
Of dollars bills
Billmont bars
And Billmont cars
Billmont stores
And Billmont whores
Billmont kiss
And Billmont bliss
Billmont Hell
For Bill and Mel
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“Techy Tacky”
Entering the Pearly Gates
Willy Wanker’s place
Check humanity at the door
Tech forever more
Oompa Loompas take your hat
Also take your cat 🐈
Leave you naught but techy tack
Fruit of Billy’s hack
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Good one!
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Robert E. Simon Jr. started the new town of Reston, VA, in the early 1960s. He was a devoted liberal. All the schools were public. And both housing and schools were integrated, a daring break in Virginia. The last 15 years of his life, he was obsessed with what was going wrong with education. I interviewed him about it when he was 100 years old. It was published after his death at 101. He was an inspiring visionary. Here’s the interview: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/22/issues-over-the-last-decade-have-me-really-steamed-a-history-making-centenarians-views-on-school-reform/?utm_term=.91665bbec546
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“The Town that Gates Built”
Billyan errs and Common Cores
Rickety stairs and creaky floors
Leaky roofs and shaky stoops
That’s the town that Gates built
Flooded basements, cracked
foundations
Broken casements, termite nations
Sagging beams and cracking seams
That’s the town that Gates built
Failing kids and firing teachers
Software bids and testing leechers
Standardizing and capitalizing
That’s the town that Gates built
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I remember watching some video or news report about this same thing being done a few years ago in Abu Dhabi. Autonomous vehicles, data analytics running everything… all the junk Bill Four Letter Word Gates loves. They built it, but they didn’t come. No one wanted to live there. It was a ghost town.
Cities are grown, not planned. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Gates is a fool. Love it. Thanks for sharing this, Diane. I needed a good laugh.
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“Gates’ Town”
Gates’ town
Or ghost town?
What is the diff?
No clown
Would come round
Visit or live
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What a weirdo Mr. Gates is.
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I thought he was giving it all away to charity.
Planned city, billville… reminds me of a joke,
Knock knock,
Who’s there?
Control freak, now this is the part when you say control freak who?
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This sounds oddly dystopian.
I’m wondering how the founding governance will work. Will he be able to collect taxes?
Will people have a say in how the city is managed?
What laws does Gates still need to keep?
Who would choose to live in his vision knowing it could change at any time?
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Why is this city not in Latin America, Africa or India (or certain devastated regions of Appalachia, for that matter), where people really need housing?
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Egad. Gates (and the rest of America) has inflicted enough damage on the “developing” world. Let those poor people alone.
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Look around in any major US city. There are plenty of people right here who need housing. If the GOP has its way on taxes, there’ll be many more. If Gates and the rest of the Billionaire Boys stopped off-shoring their wealth and paid their taxes, that problem could be solved.
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He won’t leave Wash State, which has lowest taxes in the nation.
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Belmont? How about Kleptopia?
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Good one.
Then, after Old Pasty Face is done near Phoenix, he can build fraternal communities such as Billandia, Plutocratia and Oligarchia…
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Don’t forget Billantis
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And Melinomia
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I had a Manhattan-raised friend who spent most of her adult life productively and happily in a planned community, Columbia, MD. It was set up in the 30’s as 10 interconnected villages. I remember her describing such things as paths where one encountered nbrs on the way to pick up mail from mailboxes grouped on a rail (just as we had in my ‘real’ upstate-NY rural hamlet). You’d see them again at the local grocery; it was easy to get to know your community. Tsk! Very 20thc. 😉
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