Company Towns

  Company owned towns are towns that were built by a specific industry, usually in a remote area, to provide housing and community services for the company's employees and their families.  Company owned towns are usually mining communities that are built close to a mine for the specific purpose of housing employees of the mine.
  In a company town, everything is owned by the company, the houses, the streets, the schools, the land, everything. There is usually a company-owned supermarket in these towns, but sometimes the company contracts out to a store chain to operate the supermarket with a certain percentage of the profits going into company coffers. The people that live in these towns pay rent to their employer by means of a paycheck deduction, they put their money in a company owned credit union or bank, eat in company owned restaurants, go to movies in a company owned theater, go to company owned schools. however, the pay scale in these towns is usually pretty high, quite a but higher than other towns nearby. 
  Company towns have a unique look to them. For example, all, or most, of the houses look identical to each other, same size, same style, etc. There are a few houses that are different and these are usually manager's houses or supervisor's houses. The businesses in these towns are all built according to a particular architectural style and, in the company towns I have  personally been to, that architectural style is usually Spanish style, white stucco buildings with red tile roofs or red shingle roofs.
  One thing I have noticed about company towns is that they are very neat, clean and orderly. They are very well tended and maintained. Very few of these towns have a traditional street grid. These towns are usually designed with curving streets. 
  Usually  these towns are policed by the company's private security force, but sometimes the security force works in conjunction with the county sheriff's department, which may have a substation in town.
  Any hospitals or clinics in these towns are company owned, but may be contracted out to a private company.
  The state I lived in for 18 years, Arizona, has 2 company towns, Bagdad and Morenci, but it used to have more. One of them, San Manuel, was a company town owned by ASARCO until 2003, but now it is a "regular" town, for lack of a better term. The residents there now own their property. San Manuel is now basically a bedroom community for Tucson.
There were once other company towns in Arizona, such as Clarkdale, Ajo, Kearny and Superior, but they were given up by their respective companies years ago. One of them, Ajo, still looks like a company town even through Phelps Dodge (now Freeport-McMoran), gave it up in the 1980s. It still has the orderliness of a company town even though it no longer is. But some of this orderliness is now abandoned, such as the huge hospital on the hill in the southern part of town. The downtown plaza of Ajo has the Spanish style look that I mentioned earlier.
  San Manuel still looks like a company town, but it was a company town until  9 years ago.
  Kearny still looks like a company town, but it no longer is. Now it is an incorporated town with its own municipal government and police force. Other former company towns have become ghost towns when the company no longer had any use for them or were re-located because an open pit mine swallowed up the original townsite. Some of these former company towns, after being given up by the company, have fallen on  hard times and are now extremely rundown, dilapidated and poverty stricken.