[tptacek]

Am I misreading this article, or is the author confusing buying all of Detroit's $20bn of outstanding debt (an unbelievably terrible idea) with buying the actual city? To "buy the city", you'd need to buy all its residential, commercial, and industrial real estate. There are $1 houses in Detroit, but there are also million dollar houses there, along with 8-figure office towers.

I think this analysis is a little silly.

[sneak]

> What would be appealing to Google would be the ability to produce city wide legislature that allowed them to use the entire city of Detroit as real life testing ground for all of their technologies without having to comply to city laws and regulations.

...and turn it into a dictatorship, too, apparently.

Someone's a bit confused.

[xxpor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distric...

[tptacek]

Isn't this just unincorporated land? There are big patches of unincorporated land in every state; they aren't lawless wastelands, but are instead managed and services by their parent counties and states.

[xxpor]

No, they used this Improvement District to gain even more power over the land then even an incorporated city would have,

>There are big patches of unincorporated land in every state; they aren't lawless wastelands, but are instead managed and services by their parent counties and states.

Tangentially, this isn't true. NJ has no unincorporated land. Most states in the north eastern quadrant of the country have their unincorporated land organized as townships, which have elected boards of trustees or similar.

[tptacek]

Huh. Neat. Didn't realize that about NJ and the NE. Thanks!

[xxpor]

No problem :)

[roc]

He seems to be suggesting Google could garner significant local influence by 'bailing out' the city of its unfunded liabilities. Not, strictly speaking, as insane as intimating that you could own the City of Detroit for $20bn. But it's still pretty 'out there'.

[tptacek]

It would cost considerably less than a billion dollars for Google to gain a commanding influence over Detroit! One billion is probably orders of magnitude more than what was spent on every election race there.

[roc]

Luckily for Google, the city's operating under the Emergency Management law. So they would have to buy significantly fewer politicians than one might expect.

Unluckily for Google, the cash-strapped state of the city is not indicative of any lack of monied influences who rather prefer things the way they are.