For Sale: One Town

Even in a Monopoly game, players buy only one avenue at a time. But in Worcestershire County in central England, most of a 7,200-acre town, Redditch, is up for sale--lock, stock and block. The package includes the land under 6,000 private houses, 5 million sq. ft. of factories, 52,000 sq. ft. of office space, 80 miles of roads, 2,650 parking places, two artificial lakes and a shopping mall adorned with live palm trees.

In 1964 Redditch was a small, sleepy town of 30,000. Then a huge building program was launched by the Redditch Development Corp. (RDC), which was created by Parliament as part of a British government-financed program to encourage people to move from large cities into the countryside. The strategy worked well enough to transform Redditch into a thriving city of 70,000.

RDC's charter expires next April, and it has decided to sell its holdings in Redditch to a single buyer rather than auction them off piecemeal. A dozen secret bids have come in from land-development companies, construction firms and pension funds. The price is expected to be nearly $100 million, or $130 million.