A company town makes your employer your landlord, grocer, school board, and mayor. In the 1880s George Pullman built a planned town outside Chicago for about 6,000 employees of his railway car company, some 12,000 people with families, complete with brick houses, indoor plumbing, a library, churches, and a theater. When the Panic of 1893 hit, he cut wages and hours but kept rents and store prices the same, so some workers took home pay envelopes with two cents in them. The Pullman Strike of 1894 paralyzed the national rail network, a federal commission called his paternalism un-American, and in 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court forced the company to give up the town.

British industrialists tried gentler versions: Lever Brothers built Port Sunlight in 1888, and the Quaker Cadbury brothers built Bournville in 1895 with gardens, workers councils, and no pubs. Geography drove others, including over a hundred textile colonies on Catalonia’s rivers and the Sewell copper mine in the Andes, founded in 1906, where 16,000 people lived on stairways instead of streets. At their peak the United States had more than 2,500 company towns, which faded with the New Deal, the automobile, and home ownership, until tech firms revived the idea.

• The Bolsover Colliery Company laid out Creswell in concentric circles so neighbors could watch each other’s doors
• Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in the Amazon imposed Midwestern food and nine to five hours, packed rubber trees into rows that blight destroyed, and was abandoned by 1934
• Under South African rule, Namibian contract miners lived in caged compounds enforced by pass laws
• In 2021 Nevada governor Steve Sisolak proposed Innovation Zones letting tech firms form their own governments
• Starbase, Texas incorporated on May 20, 2025, with SpaceX vice president Bobby Peden as its first mayor