I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be able to do it at all...

The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the back of ideology as much as the promise of economic return.

The closest examples I can think of in modern times for this kind of project are in folks like Musk and Allen (and his Vulcan real estate development group), but they are much more capitalistic in motivation.