Apparently, Detroit is considering selling Belle Isle to a private real estate developer
And Chicago already sold all their parking meters to a group of Middle Eastern investors.
That’s not unusual. A lot of cities have leased out parking meters on a long term basis (though usually not quite that long).
Read the article again. That’s somebody’s pie-in-the-sky dream. It’s never going to happen. Detroit’s bankruptcy sure as shit isn’t going enable some developer to create his own private nation.
Not necessarily. Municipal corporations can own public lands in their own right. There can also be Crown corporations which operate at arm’s length from the Government and own lands in their own name. Both of those types of lands are publicly owned, but not by the Crown.
Let’s say Parliament votes to sell the park land and Elizabeth II withholds the Royal Assent. Whose side do you think the people would be on?
Interesting point. The people would doubtless side with Her Maj, as everyone loves the parks and nobody likes a greedy property developer, which would topple the Government and spark a General Election. Bring it on!
I see that houses on the border with Hyde Park go for around £10,000,000. If one were to build blocks of luxury flats on each of the park’s corners, totaling (say) 48 flats at £5,000,000 each then that would be £240,000,000’s worth of property (although I suppose a property develop would pay quite a bit less than that for the land initially).
That doesn’t really put a dent hundreds of billions though…
Nor was the TSB.
What’s the TSB?
A publicly traded bank that merged with Lloyds and was spun off again by the government in 2009 after the UK bank bailout.
They’re considered toxic waste. Superfund will pay for it.