I can see why they didn't go with Walt's EPCOT

[jeffb]

WED or another private company created and owned by Walt would have been the exclusive contractor to design and build EPCOT at the total expense of the sponsors.

When Disney built / developed Celebration, they used two builders to build the original housing, which per books on Celebration had been described as not very good to good (but never outstanding). They really missed an opportunity to lock in the home construction profit and probably would have been better quality homes.

 

[ctwhalerman]

They could bulldoze the entire project at any time and start over if they desired. It would have been no problem because sponsors and investors would suffer the financial loss, not Walt or the Disney Company.

Though they would have owned the land, I seriously doubt that they would ever consider bulldozing the entire site if it failed. If it had been a colossal failure, it would be on par with such failed or hated (and still extant) projects as the 1965 Pennsylvania Station/Penn Plaza/Madison Square Garden (almost universally hated in New York) or the massive 1976 Olympic Stadium developments (ditto in Montreal), or public housing failures in Detroit and St. Louis which took years to finally demolish. Once EPCOT opened, it would have been around for a while, even if faults were apparent from the day it opened. It would have been too expensive to destroy all or part of the city because it was simply too big and too much capital would have already been invested in the project to call it a failure and just do away with it. Though I suppose changes may have moved faster because it would be private, and not public (the Pennsylvania Station site is finally being eyed for redevelopment to fix the mistakes made 40 years ago, to show how public bureaucracy moves), it may have taken decades to change or finally demolish the property.

Writing this rant has made me think of something very prohibitive that may have stopped this project had Walt been alive: the cost of construction. Building a city, especially one that was supposed to have (I think) 20,000 inhabitants, would require enormous amounts of steel and other materials, and a huge project like this would have been enough to send the prices of materials through the roof, and given the state of the American steel companies in the 1970s, there may have been drastic problems in filling the orders, resulting in delays and overruns that could have doomed the project before it was finished. Add in the fact that rails would have to be laid to transport the large amount of material, along with other logistics like filling thousands of construction jobs and dealing with the unions, and the cost would have been enormous, though feasible.