Celebration Florida: The Story of a Utopia that Never Was
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Yeah, there's a lot of like really dark, violent discussion in here. What else? Just the violence. You know, you'd think a podcast episode about Disney's own branded neighborhood would be safe for all ears. And it is, except for the 5% of it where we talk about the awful crimes that have happened there. Yes. Yeah. Which will be at the end. I think that was a good thing to do. Yeah.

But something to know about Celebration Florida, if you don't know anything about it, we're talking about a town that Disney built, not figuratively, but literally. Yeah. Yeah. Technically it was in Walt Disney, but the Disney company did. Okay. So get off my back. Because it was this town meant to be like outside of real life.

Everyone outside of celebration is fascinated with anything that can possibly be construed as dark or twisted or bizarre or awful. Oh, yeah. It's almost like people want to root for it to be messed up. I don't get it, but it's all over the place. Yes. Is it really interesting? Okay.

Yeah, if you read articles about it, I think every major publication within the last 10 or so years has at least one article about the dark side of Celebration Florida. Right. And it's all the same stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think if you are doing a thing where you're like, hi, we're going to build a town that harkens back to the good old days.

of peach pie and picket fences and the ultimate Eden for your family to live in. And then these kind of things happen.

then of course it's going to get, I'm not saying they're asking for that kind of treatment, but when it's billed as such a, you know, wonder years sort of thing. Right. That's like if the wonder years had episodes with murder and sexual assault. Right. People would be like, what? The very special two-parter of different strokes. Oh, exactly. It was stunning. But yeah, it kind of puts a target on your back, even though these people just want to be left alone. They want to go live off in their own bubble. Yeah.

That's kind of the point of the whole thing. As a matter of fact, people who live in celebration, I'm not sure if they still do, but at the heyday, toward the beginning of it, people definitely referred to it as living in the bubble. And I say we get to the backstory first because there's a very interesting backstory about –

the Disney companies and Walt Disney in particular's machinations that ended up leading to Celebration Florida being established. I love this stuff. Some might say the backstory is the best part. I don't know who would say that, but sure. It's good for sure. All right. So let's go back in time then to the mid-1960s, specifically 64 and 65, when Walt Disney, the real person,

was like, hey, this Disneyland out here in California is a huge hit. Let's do the same thing in Florida. And so they, the corporation that is, went in and very quietly, one might even say in a clandestine manner, bought up about 43 square miles, over 27,000 acres in the Orlando area through

I guess. I mean, were they shell companies or just different arms or set up just to do this? They were shell companies set up just to do this. They were aliases used. Yeah. And one of the companies was called Not Walt Disney LLC. That's right. Ricky Rouse Enterprises. That's right.

Like it was all legal, but the point that they were doing that for was because if any landowner at the time had been like, oh, Disney's buying up a bunch of land, I'm sure they're going to need my parcel. So I'm going to triple the asking price. It definitely would have happened. Yeah.

So they were very smart. And by the time people caught on, they'd finished their buying spree. And they were finally outed in the Orlando Sentinel, I think in, I don't know, 65 maybe, as surely the people who were behind this buying spree. And you said something about them, like Walt Disney saying like, hey, let's try Disneyland in Florida. He definitely wanted to do that, but he wanted to do it on just such a,

a vastly larger, more sweeping, more imaginative scale that it was almost like, it's just amazing that this man ever lived. And there's tons of criticism of him, rightfully so in a lot of ways, but his imagination and like what he got done and what he gave the world is just, it's remarkable. Yeah.

Yeah, and one thing we need to point out about this land is it was not like, you know, prime land, especially in 1964. Before there was Disney World there, it was not the Orlando that we know today. And this land, like a lot of it was swampland that they had to spend a lot of money and time, you know, dredging, draining, building canals and making it a, you know, a habitable place.

Yeah, I saw that they moved 10 million cubic yards of dirt. They had to develop 20,000 of the 24,000 acres because it's just basically swamp. And it dug 50 miles of canals. And they were doing all this. Like you said, Orlando wasn't the Orlando that it is today. Orlando is the way it is today because of what they were doing during this period. This is what started it.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is under any misconceptions about what built that town. Sure. And it was a guy with a little pencil-y mustache. But the town that ended up there, Celebration, is not what the original plan was. The original plan was way cooler because if you've ever been to Epcot, their experimental prototype community of Tomorrow, one of their theme parks there,

And you walked around and looked at the vision for this idyllic society. That was what they were trying to build. It was supposed to be a neighborhood where people lived. And actually, Epcot was a real place and not a theme park. Did you see the photo spread of the Epcot model, the original Epcot model I sent you? Yeah, a couple of those houses were pretty sweet. Isn't that sweet? Yeah, it was really cool. And I saw that Walt Disney...

planned for Epcot, the experimental prototype community of tomorrow, to never be finished, to never be complete, to always be trying new stuff.

A, B, T, and S, I think is what he said. And it didn't quite go that way. After he died and when they finally did build Epcot, they called it that. And it is like meant to demonstrate future cool technology. And then also kind of confusingly, all the countries and nations of the world at the same time.

But it is a really cool park. But it's nothing like what he wanted. The people don't live there. It's not like an experimental community. And that would actually become celebration later on. Yeah, I mean, he kind of wanted it to be like Tomorrowland, which is, you know, people parking their cars in tunnels underground, moving around on the monorails and the people movers. And again, just sort of this...

idyllic suburban, but like a new type of suburbia. And in fact, what would eventually go to be called in the 80s, in the early 80s, new urbanism, which was this, you know, we'll get, well, I guess we can get to that right now, huh? Sure. Yeah, because they kind of prefigured it, right? Yeah, for sure. New urbanism came along in the early 80s, and it was based on this idea of

You know, nice looking architecture, houses with, you know, where different people, different income levels would live. Very walkable, set up in a nice grid. And you could walk to the store and to the playground and to work and to school. And it's super safe. And it, you know, this is just sort of, again, that idyllic vision of the future.

Right. Yeah. So this is what Celebration ended up being. It's considered a new urbanist town. But again, like I think Epcot opened in 1982, right? Yeah.

And it would be, that was a full decade or so before they even really started to think about building Celebration. But in the meantime, I have to say, I want to give the obligatory shout out anytime we mention Epcot to the, I think it's on Dangerous Minds website, about the group of friends who hid out in the Horizons ride at Epcot in the late 80s and photo documented their time there. It's really cool to check out. And then one other thing.

I found this years back, but they planned an airport and there actually were flights that went directly to Disney World for a very brief time, I think in the early 70s. But on the landing strip, you know, rumble strips when you like start to go off of the highway on the shoulder, it's got those ripples that like make it sound and wake you up. Mm-hmm.

They created a rumble strip on the runway for the plane to run over that when you run over it, and you can do this in your car, I think at about 45 miles an hour, it plays When You Wish Upon a Star as a rumble strip. Yeah, they have those in roads in different countries. And it's not like a solid strip, but it just hits various, you know, tiny little bumps that cause musical notes. That's neat. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Okay, so back to it. So we've got Epcot in 1982. And by the mid 80s, there was a guy named Michael Eisner running the show, right? Yeah.

Yeah, and we should point out that, you know, one of the big reasons that the original Epcot idea of like a livable real space went the other direction is because Walt Disney died in the interim. And after that, everything kind of changed. And that's when it became a theme park. But yeah, Eisner would come on board in the early, I guess, mid 80s and 84. Big new urbanism guy was a big architecture guy still is.

And things were like this was the early to mid 80s when Disney World was really, really in a big, big growth pattern, I guess. You know, hotels and expanding the park and all kinds of stuff.

And they said, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to we're going to lop off part of this southeast corner of the property on the east side of I-4. And we're just going to reserve that for now. Think about what to do with it. And they started to get a little nervous that they were taking too long to think about it and that the state may come in and be like, hey, you're not developing it like you said you would. We're taking that back.

Right. So they decided to build a community. They kind of took up that part of Epcot that had been cut off of the actual executed plan and see what they could do with it. Right. So in 1985, they started figuring out how to do this and they put out a request for bids. I can't remember what the last word is, but sure. Like a creative brief? Yeah. Yeah.

A request for proposal, RFP. Yeah, those, those businessy things that we've never had to do. No, thank God. And then four architecture firms submitted their ideas. And I think two were selected to put together the final plan.

And the whole thing started to take off from there, starting in 1985. I saw that as far as at the beginning, they were starting to kind of test names for the place, like right off the bat. Terrible names. In focus groups, terrible names. Tell them some of the names. The Golden Oberon Jubilee.

Okay. Where do you live? Oh, you know, Golden Oberon Jubilee. Or Godge. Godge. What else? Odyssey Ventura Horizons Landmark or Oval. How about Aurora Solaris Rainbow Majestic? Seriously, these sound like CIA projects.

Yeah, that's A-S-R-M, not to be confused with A-S-M-R. Right. I also saw Fantasia Jubilee and Hyperion Madeira. Like, they were just, I don't know what they were doing. Like, how could you even waste money on a focus group with these ideas, right? So finally, they're like, well, how about something shorter and catchier, punchier? At least shorter. Right. Horizons.

No, they used that on the ride already. Ameritown, it's a little on the nose. Somebody said Celebration, and they went, Celebration's it, man. Celebration's it. And they fired that person so that they couldn't take any credit for coming up with the idea, and they told everybody Michael Eisner did. I'm surprised that they didn't literally name it, like, Mouseville or something. Yeah. I mean, that's better than Odyssey Ventura Horizons Landmark. Right?

I mean, it sounds like a horsey book, like tweet. Oh, that's good stuff. All right. So they also, you know, it was a good move for Disney at the time because in the mid 1980s had a little bit of a black eye because of this tens of millions of dollar infrastructure money that Disney didn't steal, but they kind of

Kept? Yeah. Or used for themselves? Yeah, essentially. So as we'll see in a second, Disney was granted essentially the same status as a city or a town, a municipality in Florida has a lot of the same rights. And one of the things it can do is apply for state money for its projects, right? Yeah.

So Orange County apparently went to go apply for a bunch of grants to help to build low-income housing. And they found that they were too late, that Disney itself had hoovered up all of the money that was earmarked for Central Florida. Fifty cities and towns had hoovered up all of that, almost $60 million for its own infrastructure. Yeah.

And like Central Florida was not happy about this at all. Orange County had to actually go to Disney and be like, can we borrow 1.8 million of that for this low income housing project? Disney's like, sure, sure. At 80 percent interest. So it was a big scandal. So them announcing Celebration was a big like, hey, look over here kind of thing. Look, we're still a big part of this. We're sinking money into this area. Don't be mad at us kind of thing. Exactly. And that...

Sort of a quasi-governmental group that you spoke of made a lot of news in the past few years, the Reedy Creek Improvement District. If you're outside the state of Florida, you probably never heard those four words until 2022 when the governor of the state of Florida got into a fight with Disney and dissolved it. And it is now the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. The irony here is—

Yeah, for sure. The irony here is, is the Reedy Creek Improvement District came about in 1967 because the Disney company successfully lobbied to get this whatever new designation in large part on the strength of that original Epcot plan.

So they gave them this because of this Epcot neighborhood idea, bailed on that, and then ended up being like, hey, we got our own little mini government here. Yeah, very much so. I mean, like it was a government up until very recently. Like they could tax residents and businesses in the area.

One of the reasons why they were granted this was so that the company could undertake things like infrastructure programs, like providing sewer and water and stuff like that, generating power. They could have, as long as the Improvement District was around, they were allowed by law to have built a Mickey Mouse nuclear power plant if they'd wanted to. Like they were that legal. It was a city essentially, right? So yeah, it was a big deal to have that taken away.

Um, but the, the upshot of that part was they were able to use some money to, um, help build celebration. But then secondly, the people who live in the Reedy Creek Improvement District are able to vote to decide what happens with Disney World and stuff like that. But that amounts to less than 60 people who live in that district. So, and they all work for Disney. Yeah.

So they all vote the way Disney wants them to vote. Well, with Celebration, they were planning on bringing like 20,000 families in. And that would really dilute Disney's vote about their own theme park, their own business. So they were like, you know what? This is actually outside of Reedy Creek.

Yeah. And by the way, you know, that nuclear power plant would have had mouse ears at the top of the silos. Do they have high voltage like towers and they're in the shape of Mickey Mouse? Yeah. Around that area. Yeah.

It's really something to see. Yeah. So here's what they did. Like you said, 20,000 families is what the original proposal was. Or was it 20,000 people? 20,000 residents, I think. Oh, was it? Okay. Sorry. Still, it's a lot. Yeah, a lot of people. So they announced this publicly in 1991 as like, hey, this is going to be open for business if you want to essentially live in a Disney World-like environment.

They held a lottery in 1995 for families to buy plots. I think for the 474 spots, they had about 5,000 entries into that lottery. And it should be no surprise that most of those people were like big Disney people that were thinking like, what could be better than living in like a Disney neighborhood? Yeah. Or essentially like a Disney, yeah, Disney neighborhood, like in every sense of the word.

And the first family moved in in 1996, Larry and Terry, the Habers. Isn't that cute? Yeah. And a few months later, downtown was finally completed. And it was a big deal. Like everybody knew about Celebration when it was being built. I think Disney ultimately shelled out about $4 billion for the creation of Celebration. In the 80s and 90s. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. In like late 90s dollars. Yeah. You want to take a break?

Oh, yeah. Gosh, we have to. Yeah, I know. It was kind of rhetorical. All right. We'll be right back. All right.

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All right. So when they started mapping out what they wanted Celebration to look like, they really reversed course on the whole Epcot idea, which was, again, a little more like Tomorrowland. Sure. And they were like, you know what we need to do is...

Make it like Chuck was talking about. Frontierland. Not quite frontierland. Somewhere in the middle, which is to say, you know, old small town America, picket fences. You know, they talked about a new American town of block parties and Fourth of July parades, spaghetti dinners, and I'm surprised he didn't say pancake breakfasts.

School bake sales, lollipops and fireflies in a jar. So, you know, they're selling and I'm not making fun of this. But they were selling an idea as much as they were selling houses. They were selling a way of life. And they're like, who cares if this is this idyllic past never actually existed? We're going to make it exist here and you can come live here. And if you like Disney, it's going to knock your socks off.

And so they modeled it kind of – and the reason I laughed because it reminds me of the real Seymour Skinner when he comes back and claims his identity. Yeah. He becomes principal and he says that he loves –

Spelling bees and skin and knees. And if that's corny, then corn me up. That's just kind of what it reminded me of. I remember a part from that episode where he said, whoever introduced him said, we would like to introduce the real Principal Seymour Skinner. Principal Seymour Skinner. Or something like that. Yeah, no, Superintendent Chalmers said that for sure. Yeah.

So I don't remember where I was headed with that point. Oh, that they modeled it on Main Street, USA. Like when you first come into Disney World. Like super cute pastel storefronts with wholesome stores behind them. Just like everything's kind of close together so you can walk and feel like you're part of a community. That's what they went with. And apparently...

Walt and Roy Disney were kind of obsessed with that turn of the century, turn of the 20th century America, because they spent about five years in a town called Marceline, Missouri. The Disney family did from 1906 to 1911. And that's kind of where they were inspired to love that kind of life. That's what they're trying to recreate with Celebration for sure. Oh, absolutely. They're literal like Municipal Seal or whatever.

I guess that's what you call it, right? Yeah. Municipal seal. Yeah. Was a girl riding a bike with a little dog chasing her and a literal picket fence in a tree. And it's just, you know, that's what they were selling. They hired, you know, branding specialists. They hired some really high profile architects. And a lot of the, you know, I'm not saying...

Again, it sounds like I'm picking on it, but a lot of these buildings were really cool. Like that post office, the design of it is super awesome. That Spanish-style hospital is beautiful. They built a Googie cinema that AMC ran, if you remember our Googie architecture. Like it was, you know, it's some cool-looking stuff.

Yeah, and just a note on that, the Celebration City seal that you described, Livia helped us out with this, and she described it as aggressively idyllic. Yeah. Oh, boy. I think that encapsulates it perfectly, right? Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, those buildings downtown were all designed. Each one was designed by a very, very famous, very well-respected architect. Each one had its own architect. Like Philip Johnson, the guy who designed the glass house, designed the bank at Celebration. Like it was, this place was a big deal when it first opened. The thing is, well, I'm not even going to spoil it yet. You can just wait. So back to what they had. One of the other things that it touted was an experimental public school. Yeah.

That house K through 12. There's no other school like it in the area. Normally they have like a grade school, maybe a middle school and a high school. This was everything. Kindergarteners to seniors in high school all going to school in the same building. That's right. Which, you know, other people have done. That's not the most radical thing in the world. But it is radical at the time in the mid 90s to have a public school that had such a sort of progressive model of education. Mm hmm.

You can go to any – you throw a rock in Atlanta and you'll hit some hippy-dippy private school that does this kind of stuff on a very small scale. But to try to do a K-12 school where you have these new progressive teaching methods, where you don't really give grades but you give assessments, where you have combined classrooms, which –

Ruby School has combined classrooms. There's a lot of benefits to that. Yeah, it's an awesome proven thing. But it's a class of 12 or 13 kids with two teachers. At one point, they had 80 kids to a class and two to three teachers in some of these big classes. 80 kids just all going nuts at the same time. Yeah, not to give away kind of where we're headed, but the idea was –

and sort of very forward-thinking at the time for public school. It definitely was, for sure. And that attracted a lot of people, too. Like, they're like, not only are we going to give you, like, a community to live in like this, your kids are going to be experimented on by Walt Disney Corporation. Drink this. They also had Celebration Place,

which was an office complex because one of the hallmarks of new urbanism is that you work nearby your home. Like you can essentially walk or bike to work. Like your community is basically your whole world. They also had retail stores. There was a Wolfgang Bakery.

Still there today. I think it was one of the original stores and it's still there, which is impressive. But one of the things that they definitely did, at least at first, if you were a chain, you could not get a foothold into this community. You also couldn't put billboards up. Like it was very strictly controlled who could come in and they definitely favored small independently owned businesses. And if it was a chain, it would be a regional chain at best at tops. Yeah.

Yeah, I can get on board with some of that stuff. Sure, for sure. It's not true anymore. There's a Starbucks there. I think there's a Starbucks absolutely everywhere, you know?

True. And I did see that in one of the videos. And I got a little bit of a chuckle. So if you decided to move there and build a house there, you couldn't just say like, geez, you know, what do I want to build? What kind of house really fits me? They would hand you a book of about 70 pages thick that said, here's one of six style houses you can build. And one of one, two, three, four, five different colors.

And you're going to have a front porch and you're going to have that picket fence, at least at first. You can't park your car in the driveway at first. You got to park that car out back. You got to keep it up. Don't even think about parking a boat in your driveway. Don't even. And some of the stuff that I've seen online, I tried to confirm like 100 percent absolutely, but I couldn't. But I also saw there was 160 page just sort of rule book for living there. Yeah. Including parking.

that every house had to have a hidden Mickey Mouse somewhere in it. Is that true? Yeah, I saw that as well. I didn't read the book itself, but yes, I saw that referenced as well from some legitimate source or other. And I did see somewhere that you could park one car in the driveway and everything else had to be around back, so I'm not really sure the rules there. But what about those lampposts?

Okay, so if you went downtown, depending on the time of year, the lamppost might be shooting out leaf-shaped confetti on you. That would be in the fall, typically. Sometimes they would also shoot out soap sud or shaving cream snow.

So it would snow on you and I guess you'd get soapy as you were walking to work. Okay. I also saw that they imported leaves and fake snow as well at times. I didn't see that elsewhere, but I just saw it in one place. But it was like that kind of place. Also, wherever you're walking downtown, they're playing like 40s and 50s like hits, music, pop music. Oh, yeah. Sure. For sure. And then in other places, they'll have hidden speakers that play recorded bird song.

And I think here's this is where we've reached the point where it's starting to become understandable why outsiders are like, this is psychotic. It gets a little creepy sounding. Yeah. Something out of a movie, you know. Right. It's so artificial that there's almost no room for.

um, nature or reality to, to come in and like, are there actual birds there or have they been driven away by the bird song? Who knows? Like, I think that's why people often compare it to, um, the neighborhood from the Stepford wives. Yeah. Or that, that one last year or a couple of years ago. No, the one with, uh,

Oh, God, Nick Kroll is the only person I can think of that's in it and he's not the lead. Harry Styles and... Oh, Don't Worry Darling? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, also The Truman Show. It gets compared to that. Oh, yeah. That's interesting because The Truman Show was filmed in Seaside, Florida. And Seaside is also like a very almost textbook example of a new urbanist Florida beach town. Yeah, I think...

seaside is a little more of a real place though, right? Like they don't have like fake bird song and stuff like that. No, no, no, no, they don't have that. And also I'm not, I don't believe. So one of the other things about celebration that we'll see is they have that 160 page rule book. It's, it's enforced. Like if your lawn goes, you know, over the, the allowed height, I think it's three or three and a half inches.

You'll get a letter from the HOA saying cut your lawn. Or if you do have that boat in your driveway, they'll be like, you got to move that boat. You can get a letter if you take your Christmas decorations down one day too late. Like everyone takes their Christmas decorations down by a certain date. It's just kind of like the HOA is very strict. And if you like rules and you like not having to go tell your neighbors to take their stupid Christmas lights down because it's March, you're

You would love to live at Celebration. I think that's the appeal for a lot of people. Yeah, for sure. So if you're going to have a new urbanist society or neighborhood, one of the kind of main tenets of that is like different kinds of people can live here of different ethnicities and different financial categories. Financial categories.

Pay groups? What would you call that? I would say different folks from different strokes. Yeah, exactly. I don't know why I couldn't think of a very simple term there. So early on, pay categories. Economic diversity is what we're looking for, is what they said at first. And they did advertise to, you know, black and Latino families. They did have some African-American employees in the sales office.

But, you know, if you're going to do something like that, sometimes you need to like, and this happens all the time in cities, like subsidize some of the housing if you want to really bring in true diversity. And instead, they took close to a million bucks and moved people out of there that they didn't want there to other places. They said, you live over here. We're not going to build anything here. We'll build some low income housing, but we're not going to do it in Celebration. You stay outside of Celebration. Yes. Yeah.

The racial diversity push was a valid, valiant, I should say, attempt. But it became pretty clear pretty quickly that it didn't work by the time the 2000 census came around. It revealed that Celebration Florida in 2000 was 88% white. And that was like...

30, 30 percent higher than the surrounding county, the rate for the surrounding county. And a lot of black families were priced out. Like if you moved to Celebration, you were paying about 30 percent more than you would for a comparable house in in Osceola County outside of Celebration.

It was just much more expensive to live there. And traditionally, black families have less family wealth to buy a house that's 30% more expensive. And then as the place became whiter and whiter, fewer and fewer black families felt comfortable living there. So it just became more and more white until more and more Hispanic families started moving in and kind of diluted the racial makeup a little more. Yeah. And if you want to feel comfortable,

if you want to either have a laugh or have a cry about home prices these days, the average price of a home in Celebration, Florida in those early years was $124,000, which was 20% higher than the complete national average. That's nuts, man. Yeah, in the good old days. I saw that now it's something like –

I think $677 is the median. Nationally? No, the median average, the median price for celebration. I don't know about nationally. Yeah. Man, $120,000. And that was 20% higher. That's not even, you can't even use that as a down payment these days. Yeah. Good luck with that. It's crazy. So, okay, back to it, Chuck. I think it's about here. Well, should we take another break or no? No.

Yeah, let's do it. Okay. I was not expecting that, but here we go, everybody. ♪

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Okay, Chuck, now we get to, since we are technically a media outlet, the darker side of Celebration Florida.

Yeah, I mean, you can't not talk about it because it was a situation where Disney rushed the project, allegedly, and these third-party contractors sometimes were under the gun to get these houses built. And what you ended up with was collapsing front porches. Apparently, like 70 of the houses needed new roofs. Their foundations were cracking. Plumbing was leaking. And not necessarily every single house, but it seemed like a lot of them were poorly built.

They were poorly built. So the construction was shoddy from the outset, especially when Disney wasn't directly involved in the construction, right? That's a huge, huge deal that will come into play a little bit down the road.

The school itself, very quickly, the parents were like, I don't know about not assigning my kids homework for the entire year or telling them what books they should go read. And they're not even giving them grades. What is this? Everybody wins on their report card. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Right.

So the parents revolted very quickly and they were like, no, we're not doing this. We want to make this more traditional. And eventually they lopped off the high school from it, built another high school in Celebration, but it was a public high school open to other areas around Celebration, not just Celebration itself.

Yeah, I also saw it was pretty much a nightmare for the teachers and staff. The principal quit after a year along with about 25% of the staff. That's after year one. And it was, you know, when you've got classrooms that size, and it's especially with a new kind of structure, it was supposedly pretty chaotic. Again, 80 children, grades, I think they had grades like three to five in the same classroom.

80 of those kids and you're one teacher trying to teach all these kids. I can't. I mean, how did they not just look at that paper and be like, this is a bad idea? Yeah. I mean, the idea with mixed grades now is and may have been then, but that's probably too many is you mix two grades together.

And one year your kid is the younger and you get good help from older buddies and it really socially kind of helps. And then the next year you're the older and then that you are the more of the mentor type. And that all plays out in the end to just, you know, socially and emotionally pretty, pretty great. But.

Again, with 80 kids, it's just tough. Right. That's my ultimate point. What you're describing sounds awesome. And I also saw that one of the reasons for putting grades together in the same, I think they call them neighborhoods or whatever, is because kids progress at different rates, some slower than others. And so if you put a bunch of grades together, those kids who are going to progress faster can progress faster. And the kids who are going to take their own time can take their own time. That makes sense to me, too. Again, it's the 80 kids.

In a single classroom, that's just – that in and of itself is nuts. What about crime? Because this is where everybody's like, hmm, yeah. Yeah, and here's where parents – if you want to not listen to these next five minutes with your kids, it might be advisable because there has been some crime. Just like any place in the world, what they didn't do was –

build some huge wall around this town, and you would still even have crime. Sure. Because that's just what happens. But in 1988, there was a, I'm sorry, 98, there was a home invasion where a couple was bound and gagged and robbed in their house. It wasn't Terry and Larry, was it? I don't think so. I hope not. This was a pretty big deal. In November 2010, the first murder and celebration happened when Matteo Patrick,

Gio Vandito, a 50-year-old retired school teacher, was living alone and was found dead, strangled with a shoelace, and had some ax work done on him. And that's horrific enough, but then it comes out later that his killer, David Israel Zenon Murillo, was there to wash his car and then brought inside, drugged with a beer, and when he woke up,

Matteo Patrick Gio Venditto was on top of him sexually assaulting him, and this guy went nuts and killed him.

He did. And the guy's story sounded a little far-fetched until I think two years later, a couple of reporters from the Daily Beast must have been tipped off because they started tracking down former students, reading depositions, looking at court filings, and found that Gio Venditto had a long history of sexually abusing his students, even going on trips with them abroad, just him and a student or two.

So, yeah. So like that doesn't excuse him being bludgeoned to death with an axe, but it definitely backs up the dude's story, you know. And I even saw in a I think an article right after it happened that Murillo was quoted as saying he got what he deserved. Like, I mean, this guy had been arrested and he was telling the press he got what he deserved when I killed him with an axe. He he got a second degree murder life sentence.

Um, for that. And also to just to be clear, if we weren't, uh, the, the victim was, uh, not a teacher in celebration. He had retired by that time. Oh, good point. Good point. Yeah. A couple of days later, it went kind of buck wild and celebration again. Right. Uh, was this the, the SWAT standoff or the, okay. I didn't know if that was the family homicide. No. Yeah.

I guess we'll get to both of them. Yeah. Yeah. All of this. That's right. No. OK. So the family homicide was 10 years later. This was a few days after Giovanni Dito's body was found in 2010. There was a guy named Craig Fouché, who was a celebration resident, and he barricaded himself in his house and started firing at the cops who came.

Yeah, I remember when this happened, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, oh yeah, it was all over the news. It was a 14-hour standoff. Eventually the police, you know, go in there with tear gas and everything and found that he had already taken his own life. And it was, you know, one of those situations where he was going bankrupt, going through a divorce, foreclosure, all that kind of thing. Yeah, that's called high risk for self-inflicted injury for sure. Yeah, and not to dwell on the crimes, but there was one last ghastly thing.

You said, I think, 10 year in 2020 when a man murdered his wife and three kids and dog and was killed.

living with their decomposing bodies when the police caught up to him. Yeah, it was around Christmas, right? And they didn't find him until January sometime? Yeah, it was very grisly and sad. That's the kind of thing that people are like, see, see, you can't get away from it. And that stuff happens elsewhere. It's just when you put it in the context of a place that has been created to not have that kind of stuff.

It just is that much more ghastly, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So back to there were a few other things that weren't crimes, but still kind of gave Celebration a strange reputation. There was something called the Celebration Death Pond.

There was a weird curve in a road at an intersection, and it wasn't clear which way you should go. And if you didn't turn the right way, you would drive right into this 15-foot retention pond. And that happened to three teenagers who just disappeared one day and weren't found for nine months. And they were finally found in that pond. They eventually fixed it, but not before Celebration Death Pond became a bit of a moniker on the Internet. Yeah, they built a wall with flashing lights.

yeah, you probably shouldn't dead into a lake with the road going left and right, like on those hard curves. Uh, another reason it's called the death pond is when they were down there, uh,

diving and looking and found this car, they found four other cars down there. No. And they're like, oh, turns out this has happened before. I didn't see that. Oh, yeah. I saw there was, as I was researching that, I found an article from Oklahoma where they found the car of three teenagers who'd gone missing in 1970. Wow.

And they found it like 40 years later. And they found another car with a group of three people that had gone missing in 1960. And 10 years apart, these cars ended up right next to each other in this lake. I know it's just so strange, but I did not know that about Celebration Death Pond. That's crazy.

All right. So we should get back to Celebration itself and kind of what happened with the town and the HOA there. Because in 2004, Disney sold the downtown town center in the business district, which was 21 buildings,

nine commercial, 10 mixed use, and two residential to a private firm called Lexin Capital, L-E-X-I-N. And all of a sudden, because they had all those different buildings, they were the majority vote in the HOA. So all of a sudden, if you lived in

Florida, and you lived in this neighborhood, you essentially had zero say over anything that went on there because Lexan owned the vote and owned the HOA, essentially. Yeah. And that's bad enough. I mean, that's just a situation ripe for abuse. But Lexan is well known around Celebration for being the opposite of transparent. And so over the course of a good decade or more,

This homeowners association started to notice like Lexington Capital wasn't responding to any calls for repairs. And remember, we said Celebration was built really quickly, often by third-party construction companies, often very shoddily.

And the townhouses, the residential stuff downtown that Lexington Capital bought were really showing signs of disrepair and nobody was showing up to repair it. And because of the structure of the ownership, the people who lived in like the condominiums only owned the interiors. So even if they wanted to pay somebody to come fix the roof, they couldn't legally do that.

That's just nuts. It is, but it's common with condos in particular. But normally the people who are in charge of that will come and have the roof repaired. But when they finally sued Lex and Capital, they found...

all sorts of terrible stuff had been going on and that they were in big trouble. And now Lexham was saying, we're going to assess 15 or 10 or $15 million to make these repairs, even though you guys have been paying into the HOA, your HOA dues, which are meant to keep up with those repairs. We're saying you owe 10 million more, and we don't know what happened to the money that you put in. Yeah. I mean, they were saying you haven't been paying your dues and

And they were like, no, we have. You can't just say that. Like, where's the money we paid? And I don't even know. Like, has this even been resolved? No, as far as I know, it's not. And it's going to take a long time to unravel.

One of the things I saw is that they in court proceedings, they found out that Lexan had not once but twice refinanced the mortgage that it had on its holdings and celebration and took out like 20 million and then another 15 million in equity. So they were sucking the money, the value out of the town and then not putting a nickel back into it to keep it up. Yeah.

Flash forward a couple of years and all of a sudden we're a country in the middle of a housing crisis and foreclosure crisis. And between 2009 and 2010, one in 20 residents of Celebration had to go through foreclosure. This is compared to one in 48 for Florida overall at the time. AMC shut down that theater. I don't think we mentioned that they're they're cool. They were like, hey, no sexy shoot them ups.

we're only going to show like really clean movies. And people, turns out, like going and seeing sexy shoot-em-ups. And they're like, we can't keep running Pleasantville over and over in the Truman Show. They're like, Pleasantville's too dirty and suggestive. So they, AMC, at least for their part, got out of that theater and it shut down. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with the theater right now, if somebody, some independent person's running it or not, or if it's just abandoned.

I bet you it's open again, but that's just a guess. I would hope so. So despite all this and despite the troubles of the people living in the downtown area with Lexington Capital, outside of downtown, it seems to be pretty much happiness generally among the owners at Celebration. I think the initial...

Almost crazy expectations from what celebration would be and could offer has been replaced by a little more realistic understanding. I think it's settled in. Yes, that's a great way to put it. But the people there are like, yeah, it's not just some amazing perfect place, but it's also not the psychotic place.

Stepford neighborhood that you guys are making it. It's a really, really nice place to live and we love living here. So leave us alone. And that seems to be kind of the general consensus of the people living in the bubble from what I can tell. Yeah. You know, if it achieved its new urbanism goals, it did in certain ways. They do have that town center and you can walk to a lot of stuff. You can bike to a lot of stuff.

There are a lot of playgrounds and things like that. And but there are also a lot of cars. And beyond that, it did not hit the criteria of things like, you know, employment opportunities for people who actually live there to work there. Affordable housing, that kind of thing. Like you said, the Latino and Hispanic population increased, I think, to about 16 percent.

They're down to 72% non-Hispanic white population now. And I think about 60% of the residents own their own house. And like you can't, the rest are renters, but even if you own a house, like there are no Airbnbs or VRBOs, like you can't rent a house short term there. No way. Yeah. No, it's literally laughable, the idea. Yes.

You got anything else about Celebration Florida? Got nothing else. I've got one more thing. If you like this and like to hear us talking about Celebration Florida, you can also go listen to us talking about Celebration Florida with our friends over at The Big Flop, right? Absolutely. We were guests on the show. They pitched Celebration Florida because, you know, the idea of the show is things that flopped. And we thought we would do our version to acquaint ourselves more with it, you know,

you know, before we recorded with them. I think theirs is going to come out first though, right? Yeah. I was going to say, we said, wow, what a coincidence. We're about to do an episode on Celebration Florida. Yeah. But check it out. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Super fun. And since Chuck and I agreed that being on the Big Flop was a lot of fun, obviously that's Unlocked Listener Mail.

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