Celebration, USA: The First Sign of What Will Be America's Homogeneous Landscape

Celebration, USA, is a town of predominantly white upper-middle class families where anyone who does not fit into the homogeneous mold is shunned. Prospective buyers are asked to sign a seventy-five-page Declaration of Covenants before being permitted to move into their home. Most residents sign away without scrutinizing the liberties they forfeit, or questioning the almost absolute power granted to the Celebration Company as a result. The corporation retains the rights to remove any property or person within the town deemed to be an "annoyance" (this includes pets), annex property if it supports the expansion of Celebration, and retains the power to veto any proposed changes made by "nominated" officials (Celebration officials are not elected but nominated by the corporation and are among the wealthiest residents). In essence, Celebration and other common interest housing developments (commonly called CIDs) should not even be thought of as "American" towns as the United States cannot legally interfere with day-to-day operations. The communities are pieces of private property and the citizens who reside within them are considered to be mere shareholders of corporate stock (Glasze 13). In a 2001 article published in The Economist, it was projected that flight from the suburbs into private communities, like Celebration, USA, would steadily increase from seventeen to a projected twenty-one million homes between the years 2001 and 2004. An average of two to three million private homes will be purchased in each subsequent year ("Growth of Private Communities" par. 6). Evan McKenzie claims there are three major reasons for this migration explosion: first, the corporate developers who own the towns need to maintain profits with rising land costs and taxes, so suburbanites are aggressively targeted and provided with reasons to flee the public suburb. Second, local public governments are able to attain tax revenues and growth without increasing municipal taxes. CIDs alleviate funding constraints for the public sector, and therefore, garner leniency in legal areas of development (such as zoning, expansion, etc.). Finally, McKenzie argues this new form of flight is the result of disenchantment with current forms of local government (2). It goes deeper than mere dissatisfaction, however, and into the depths of the American psyche that has been manipulated into believing a heterogeneous life is a dangerous one. This implies that private communities will spark a "secession of the successful" finding half of the future population in a town controlled by restricting corporations, while the lower half will be subject to a poorly funded public area that aims not to compete with CIDs but to support them. The contention being posited here is twofold: first, the article seeks to illustrate that white flight finds origin not only in government disenchantment but in fear of what heterogeneous lifestyles have come to represent. Secondly, the article will successfully show that white flight will segregate two cultures, providing conglomerates with almost absolute power over a majority of the American populace.1 To support these suggestions, the history of culturally homogeneous flight will be briefly chronicled so an understanding of the term "homogeneous values" can be attained. The second section will briefly discuss how white flight is not based on race but cultural stereotypes and that this has created two populations with distinct cultural values. A concluding study of Celebration, USA, will suggest that even though modern flight finds origin in what I refer to as cultural labeling, its consequences are just as pernicious as government-imposed segregation. Achieving Cultural Segregation through Hybridity Manipulation New questions are raised with the introduction of Celebration, and the ones most deserving of scrutiny are how does the implementation of legal, cultural segregation provide corporations with unlimited power? …