On a form of power the nineteenth century invented, the twentieth century discredited, and the twenty-first century quietly revived in Eastern Collier County
In 1880, the Pullman Palace Car Company built a town on the prairie south of Chicago. George Pullman intended it as a model community — clean, orderly, designed by a professional architect, equipped with parks and churches and a library, organized around the needs of the workers who manufactured his sleeping cars. He controlled the housing, the water supply, the gas works, the hotel, the shops, and the church. He owned the newspaper. He employed the town’s only physician. He set the rents. He determined which businesses could operate and which could not. He banned trade unions, taverns, and any form of civic organization that might complicate his management of the place.
For about a decade, observers described Pullman as a success. Then, in 1893, a severe economic depression drove the company to cut wages without cutting rents. The workers, who had no mechanism to contest either decision — no elected government, no independent press, no public meeting that was not ultimately subject to the company’s approval — went on strike. Federal troops were eventually called in. The town’s founding philosophy, which had always been the philosophy of benevolent authority rather than civic participation, produced exactly the crisis that civic participation exists to prevent: a population with legitimate grievances and no legitimate way to express them, producing an illegitimate way instead.
The strike and its violent suppression became one of the defining labor episodes of the Gilded Age, but the lesson drawn from it was less about wages than about structure. A special commission appointed by President Cleveland to investigate the strike concluded that the paternalistic control of a town by a single private entity was, regardless of the entity’s intentions, incompatible with the basic conditions of civic health. People who have no genuine voice in the decisions that govern their daily lives develop, over time, a corrosive combination of dependence and resentment. The company town, however thoughtfully designed and however generously managed, is structurally incapable of producing genuine community, because genuine community requires the participation of its members as authors of their common life, not merely as inhabitants of someone else’s.
Pullman is the most famous example, but the history of company towns in America is long and fairly consistent in its conclusions. The coal towns of Appalachia, where miners lived in company houses and bought their food at company stores with company scrip, became synonymous with exploitation precisely because the absence of civic checks on company power meant that every single point of leverage in a worker’s life was controlled by the same entity that also determined his wages. The textile mill towns of the Carolina Piedmont. The logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. The copper mining towns of Arizona. The specific industries varied; the structural problem was always the same. When a single private entity controls the land, the housing, the commerce, the utilities, the information, and the governance of a place, the residents of that place are not citizens. They are dependents, and the distinction matters enormously.
What the academic literature found
Scholars studying company towns across the twentieth century arrived at conclusions that were remarkably uniform across different historical contexts and methodological approaches. The political scientist Charles Tiebout’s famous 1956 model of local government suggested that the health of a community depends on the ability of its residents to “vote with their feet” — to signal their preferences by choosing among competing jurisdictions. Company towns eliminate this mechanism by concentrating all the relevant decisions in a single hand. Residents cannot leave without losing their housing, their employment, and often their access to basic services simultaneously. The result is a captured population whose expressed preferences cannot be trusted to reflect genuine satisfaction, because the costs of expressing dissatisfaction are prohibitively high.
The sociologist C. Wright Mills, writing about the concentration of power in American life, identified a related dynamic in communities where economic and political power coincide in the same set of hands. In such communities, the formal structures of democratic deliberation — the public meeting, the elected board, the local newspaper — persist as theater rather than as substance. The decisions are made before the meeting. The newspaper reflects the interests of its owner. The board consists of people who serve at the pleasure of the entity that appointed them. The appearance of civic participation exists alongside its complete absence, and the gap between appearance and reality is itself a form of governance, because it prevents the formation of any coherent alternative politics.
The historian Thomas Dublin, in his study of the textile mill towns of New England, documented the specific mechanisms by which company control of information was used to prevent workers from developing an accurate picture of their own situation. When the company controls the local newspaper, it controls not merely the editorial line but the framework of questions that get asked and the vocabulary in which they get asked. Problems that would embarrass the company do not get covered. Decisions that would be contested if they were widely understood get made quietly. The residents of a company-controlled town can be simultaneously well-informed about matters of no civic consequence and systematically ignorant of the decisions that most directly affect them.
These are not abstract academic concerns. They describe, with some precision, the situation of residents in Ave Maria, Florida, in 2026.
The structure of control
Let us be specific about what Barron Collier Companies controls in Ave Maria, because the list is clarifying in a way that no general description of “developer influence” can be.
Barron Collier controls the land. The company or its affiliates hold the underlying land on which the town is built, and as the primary landowner, it retains the dominant voice in decisions about what gets built, where, at what density, and for whom.
Barron Collier controls the commercial properties. The retail spaces of the town center and the commercial corridors are predominantly owned or managed by Barron Collier affiliates, which means the company determines which businesses can locate in town, at what lease rates, under what terms, and with what incentives or disincentives attached.
Barron Collier controls the water utility. The private utility company that provides potable water and wastewater services to residents is a Barron Collier entity. This is not a minor matter. Control of the water supply is one of the most direct and intimate forms of control over a community that exists, and it is the kind of control that historically has not been entrusted to private entities for exactly that reason.
Barron Collier controls the town’s primary information channel. The publication that most residents encounter as their primary source of local news and information is produced by or under the influence of Barron Collier. The decisions about what gets covered, how prominently, and with what framing are not made by an independent editorial board accountable to the reading public. They are made, directly or indirectly, by an entity with a financial interest in the perception of Ave Maria among current residents, prospective buyers, and the broader real estate market.
Barron Collier controls the marketing apparatus. Every promotional video, every glossy brochure, every digital advertisement selling Ave Maria to prospective investors and residents is produced under Barron Collier’s direction. The image of Ave Maria that is presented to the world is curated by the same entity whose development decisions are systematically undermining the reality of the town.
Barron Collier controls the property management. The management of rental properties across significant portions of the town runs through Barron Collier-affiliated entities, which means the company effectively mediates the landlord-tenant relationship for a substantial portion of the residential population.
And Barron Collier controls the governing board. Under the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District Act, the Board of Supervisors of the AMSCD — the governing body with authority over the district’s infrastructure, finances, and land use decisions — is currently composed of three seats elected by landowners under the one-acre, one-vote principle, and two seats elected by resident-qualified electors. The landowner-elected majority represents, in practice, Barron Collier’s interests, because Barron Collier holds the dominant land position within the district. The residents hold the minority. The governing body of the town where families are raising their children and building their lives votes, on every contested question of consequence, three to two in favor of the entity that owns the land under their feet.
George Pullman would have recognized the structure immediately.
The distance between the decision-maker and the decision
There is a concept in political philosophy, developed most fully in the subsidiarity tradition of Catholic social teaching but present in various forms across the entire history of democratic thought, that the legitimacy of a decision depends in part on the proximity of the decision-maker to its consequences. People who will live with the results of a decision have knowledge about its likely effects that no distant authority can replicate. They know which intersection floods in a heavy rain, which commercial space has been vacant long enough to signal a market failure, which neighborhood amenity actually gets used and which sits empty, which housing product attracts the families who become members of the community and which attracts the transient tenants who pass through it without ever connecting to it.
This is not merely a philosophical point. It is an epistemological one. Distant authority, however well-intentioned, makes worse decisions than proximate authority because it lacks the local knowledge that good decisions require. The economist Friedrich Hayek made this argument in the context of economic planning, but it applies with equal force to urban governance. The information needed to make good decisions about a community is dispersed across the community’s members, embedded in their daily experience of the place, and accessible only through mechanisms that allow that distributed knowledge to surface and influence outcomes. Democratic participation is one such mechanism. It is the principal one. When it is absent or structurally compromised, the quality of decisions declines.
The specific decisions that Barron Collier has made about Ave Maria in recent years are consistent with this prediction. The approval of subdivisions designed for commuters rather than college-town residents. The accommodation of production homebuilders who bring their national catalog rather than architecture responsive to the founding vision. The development of commercial spaces that serve the automobile rather than the pedestrian. The absence of owner-occupancy requirements or lease-term limits in residential development, leaving the door open to the investor acquisition and transient tenancy that hollows out community membership as surely as anything else.
Most damaging among these is the effective surrender of whole neighborhoods to bulk investor purchasers, a significant proportion of them foreign entities with no connection whatsoever to Ave Maria’s culture, its founding mission, or the people who have built their lives here. These investors are not neighbors. They are not members of the community in any meaningful sense. They purchased residential units as yield-producing assets, and they manage them as yield-producing assets, which means their interest in the character of the community extends precisely as far as the character of the community affects their cap rate. Properties acquired by this class of investor tend toward deferred maintenance, high turnover, and the steady accumulation of tenants who have no particular attachment to the community and no particular incentive to develop one. The streets fill with residents who are passing through. The fabric of membership and affection that makes a neighborhood something more than a collection of housing units progressively dissolves.
Barron Collier approved the development conditions that permitted this. Barron Collier controls the board that could impose owner-occupancy requirements and choose not to. Barron Collier’s information channel is not covering this story in the way it would be covered by an independent press. And Barron Collier’s marketing materials continue to sell Ave Maria as a tight-knit Catholic family community with walkable streets and a vibrant town culture, because that image is what attracts new buyers, and new buyers are what keeps the yield flowing.
The information problem and its consequences
The company town’s most insidious feature, as the historical scholarship documents, is not the control of land or utilities or commerce. It is the control of information, because information control determines whether a population can develop an accurate picture of its own situation and organize itself to address it.
A town whose primary information channel is controlled by its dominant developer will not receive coverage of the developer’s decisions that is proportionate to the civic importance of those decisions. This is not necessarily the result of explicit censorship. It is often simply the result of the incentive structures that govern what gets written, by whom, and in what context. A publication that depends on the developer for its operational existence does not need to be explicitly instructed to avoid certain topics. The avoidance is built into the structure of the relationship. The editor knows which stories would create problems, and the knowledge shapes every decision about coverage long before any specific piece is assigned.
The result is a community whose members are, in various ways and degrees, uninformed about the governance decisions that most directly affect them. They may know that new subdivisions are being built. They are much less likely to know the specific terms under which they were approved, what architectural and design standards were waived or weakened, what investor-acquisition trends the new residential product is enabling, or how the governing board voted and on whose motion. This information exists in public documents. In a community with a genuinely independent press, it would be reported. In a company town, it tends not to be.
The path the law provides
The situation is not permanent, and it is worth being precise about why. The AMSCD Act, in its board composition provisions, contains a mechanism for the transition from landowner control to resident control. The statute provides that as the urbanized area of the district grows as a percentage of total district area, additional board seats convert from landowner election to resident election. At the 25 to 50 percent urban area threshold — which the district may be approaching — two seats are elected by residents and three by landowners. Cross the 50 percent threshold, and three seats shift to resident election, giving residents the majority for the first time. The thresholds continue upward, with four resident seats at 70 percent urbanization and full resident control at 90 percent.
The Urban Area Map update required by December 2026 is the mechanism through which the current urban area percentage is formally determined. If that percentage crosses the 50 percent threshold, the next regularly scheduled election would shift board control toward the residents who actually live here. This is not a loophole or an accident. It is the statute’s recognition that a town’s governance should eventually reflect its inhabitants, and that the landowner-majority arrangement appropriate to a development in its earliest stages is not appropriate to a mature community with thousands of resident families.
Residents should understand this mechanism clearly, because Barron Collier understands it clearly as well. The incentive to shape the Urban Area Map update in ways that preserve landowner majority is real, and the mechanisms available to pursue that incentive — boundary expansions, definitional arguments, phasing decisions — deserve scrutiny proportionate to the stakes. A community that does not understand how its own governance works cannot protect itself against the manipulation of that governance.
What a town actually requires
The company town model failed everywhere it was tried, not because the companies that built these towns were uniformly malicious but because the structural conditions of the model are incompatible with the requirements of genuine civic life. A community needs genuine civic participation, a genuinely independent press, governance that is accountable to the people it governs, and the ability to surface and act on the distributed local knowledge of its members. These are not luxuries or optional features of a healthy town. They are its constitutive requirements. Strip them away and what remains is a managed population, not a community.
Ave Maria has the bones of something extraordinary. The Church is real. The university is real. The families who came here to build a Catholic life together are real, and their commitment is genuine. The founding vision, documented in the town plan and the enabling legislation and the marketing materials that sold this place to tens of thousands of people, is worth fighting for.
What is needed is civic infrastructure to match the physical infrastructure. A genuinely independent publication that covers Ave Maria’s governance as the public trust it is, that reports on development decisions and board votes and investor-acquisition trends and the gap between the founding vision and the current trajectory. Resident participation at every public meeting where decisions are being made. The organized presence, in numbers that cannot be ignored, of the people who will live with the consequences of those decisions. And the clear-eyed strategic attention to the December 2026 map update that represents the single most consequential near-term opportunity to shift the balance of formal power.
The company town is not an inevitability. It is a structure, and structures can be changed. Pullman’s model was discredited within a generation of its founding, not by the courts alone but by the organized refusal of its inhabitants to accept the terms under which they had been placed. The residents of Ave Maria are in a substantially better legal and political position than the Pullman workers of 1894. They have the law on their side, a statutory path to board majority, and the moral authority of a founding vision that the dominant entity has repeatedly failed to honor.
That is enough to work with. Whether it will be enough depends on whether residents are willing to show up, pay attention, learn the relevant documents, and insist on being treated as citizens rather than tenants of someone else’s vision.
The first step is to understand, clearly and without flinching, what kind of structure they are living inside.
