This could be interesting…
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban purchased an entire, tiny — and virtually empty — Texas town.
An abandoned strip club and vacant mobile home park are about all that’s still standing in the 76.8-acre community of Mustang, which is about 65 miles south of American Airlines Center, home of Cuban’s NBA franchise.“Did it to help out a friend. No plans yet!” Cuban said in an email to NBC News on Friday.
If I could buy a town, I wouldn’t sell it off, parcel by parcel: I would assess a ground rent on the land, with the rents going to support continued infrastructure improvements to make the land more valuable, allowing the rents to be raised (as the land becomes more valuable to entrepreneurs). Or will he just speculate and sell it off? He could build a model town without sales taxes or other disincentives to development, proving that as land grows more valuable and more remunerative, there is no need to tax the sweat of working people.