Developer pitches $1B commonwealth for Detroit's Belle Isle

[thelakelander]

Would you sell one of your most valued urban green spaces to a developer who desires to turn it into a city-state with its own laws, customs, and currency for $1 billion?


http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130112/BIZ/301120319/1409/?source=nletter-news

Detroit â€" As the broken city thinks big and radically about its future, a developer is stepping forward with a revolutionary idea: Sell the city's Belle Isle park for $1 billion to private investors who will transform it into a free-market utopia.

The 982-acre island would then be developed into a U.S. commonwealth or city-state of 35,000 people with its own laws, customs and currency.

City officials are likely to reject the plan. But on Jan. 21, supporters including Mackinac Center for Public Policy senior economist David Littmann, retired Chrysler President Hal Sperlich and Clark Durant, co-founder of Detroit's Cornerstone Schools, will present the Commonwealth of Belle Isle plan to a select group of movers and shakers at the tony Detroit Athletic Club.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130112/BIZ/301120319#ixzz2IT9SpodB

In 1950, Detroit was a vibrant city; the wealthiest in the nation.  Now, despite all the efforts of many good people, the city has lost most of its population and is now the poorest, most dangerous, most run down city in America.

Detroit needs a game changer.  The 982 acre island of Belle Isle can be that game changer for Detroit.  The book Belle Isle is about that vision.

The setting is Belle Isle, 30 years in the future.  Twenty nine years prior (2013), Belle Isle was sold by the city of Detroit for $1 billion dollars to a group of investors who believed in individual freedom, liberty and free markets.  They formed their own city-state, with innovative systems of government, taxation, labor and money.  People soon came from all over the world to be part of this culture of unlimited opportunity.  Belle Isle became the “Midwest Tiger,” rivaling Singapore as an economic miracle.  Although numbering only 35,000 citizens, it generated billions of dollars in desperately needed economic growth and became a social laboratory for the western world.

Detroit shared in the genuine Renaissance.  The large sum paid for Belle Isle was used to train Detroiters to fill the huge need for construction workers on Belle Isle.   Beyond this, the construction of this remarkable new nation by private money provided years of economic boost for Detroit and Southeast Michigan, and the sparks generated by the fires of “can do” optimism and a new social pact jumped the river, causing factories and farms to be built in Detroit, restoring it to its former glory.

Big changes take big ideas, power arising from noble intent, and leaders of great vision and courage.  It happened before with the birth of America.  It can happen again.

All this is possible on Belle Isle.

http://www.commonwealthofbelleisle.com/

[Charles Hunter]

Is that where Glen Beck is going to build Becktopia?
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/17/glenn-becks-utopian-community-a-place-called-independence-u-s-a/