Not sure if that would count as “for ends of public utility”. Anyone experienced in this field? This would take a city size amount of farmland for the downtown and most of the city (I think any small towns caught up in the boundaries would be incorporated into it).
This would be kicked off with federal offices, but not necessarily political capitol. There are a ton of federal jobs that really don’t need to be located in a high cost of living area.
The term “eminent domain” was taken from the legal treatise De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), written by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625,[5] which used the term dominium eminens (Latin for “supreme ownership”) and described the power as follows:
The property of subjects is under the eminent domain of the state, so that the state or those who act for it may use and even alienate and destroy such property, not only in the case of extreme necessity, in which even private persons have a right over the property of others, but for ends of public utility, to which ends those who founded civil society must be supposed to have intended that private ends should give way. But, when this is done, the state is bound to make good the loss to those who lose their property.
Your purpose would be to allow a ton of federal jobs in a low col area? That would destroy the towns from where they move and create a new high col area.
Existing cities have lots of other businesses, they can survive without the fed jobs. And those lots of other businesses are what causes high COL. High population without room to grow.
Every state in the US reserves eminent domain. Meaning you don’t truly own your land anyway. You just have a reserved right to that land which can be removed at anytime. However you are required to be compensated under the Fifth Amendment
I started writing up a summary myself, but I started to realize it was looking like a college term paper and this summarizes it much better lol.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Because my ADHD.
This is basically how the city of Richland, Washington came into its present form. During the Manhattan Project the federal government took over the town and some adjacent villages, evicting about 300 people, and built it into a bedroom community that eventually housed about 25,000 people for the nearby Hanford site.
The Federal Government could make the city with eminent domain. The issue is that the Federal Government is going to have to figure out how to run the city after it gets built.
The Federal Government can only override a state government in municipal issues on federally owned land. So, it becomes awkward when the capital becomes a city and you start getting a patchwork of public and private lands. There is a reason why DC is its own entity and its government serves the Federal Government.
So while the USA could create a new capital with existing powers, it will probably need a constitutional amendment to handle the creation of a new federal city independent of the states.
Probably only if that city was a new planned capitol like the CBC has suggested be developed on the Republican River.
Oh I missed that I’m thinking this would be for federal offices. Not sure about political capital like congress just because, but we have a ton of federal workers that really don’t need to be located in a high cost of living area.
See that could be pretty easily achieved without eminent domain.
If you announced the program you’d probably have cities bidding against each other to host this department or that.
You’d probably have to create whole new departments just to appease cities and states that ended up not getting offices that you want to keep political capital with.
Establishing a Department of Language Accomodation in Queens would probably be the safe bet to test this kind of shenaniganery with.
A new downtown would make a subway very easy and cheap to build, you could cut and cover instead of tunnelling. Cheeeaaap land for huge offices, roads, and even houses. Whenever you try to scale up an existing town/city you run into all the old problems of land and layout problems. Cities bidding against each other would be short term appealing but still expensive when it comes to building everything. Green field is just so cheap.
From an urban planning perspective, there are some caveats to your points:
A new downtown would make a subway very easy and cheap to build, you could cut and cover instead of tunnelling
Cut-and-cover will make shallow underground tunnels cheaper to construct in almost all cases irrespective of building in an old city center or as part of building a new city center from scratch. In fact, older pre-WW2 cities are almost ideal for cut-and-cover because the tunnels can follow the street grid, yielding a tunnel which will be near to already-built destinations, while minimizing costly curves.
Probably the worst scenario for cut-and-cover is when the surface street has unnecessary curves and detours (eg American suburban arterials). So either the tunnel follows the curve and becomes weirdly farther from major destinations, or it’s built in segments using cut-and-cover where possible and digging for the rest.
Cheeeaaap land for huge offices, roads, and even houses
At least in America, where agricultural land at the edges of metropolitan areas is still cheap, the last 70 years do not suggest huge roads, huge offices, and huge house lead to a utopia. Instead, we just get car-dependency and sprawl, as well as dead shopping malls. The benefits of this accrued to the prior generations, who wheeled-and-dealed in speculative suburban house flipping, and saddled cities with sprawling infrastructure that the existing tax base cannot afford.
Green field is just so cheap.
It is, until it isn’t. Greenfield development “would be short term appealing but still expensive when it comes to building everything”. It’s a rare case in America where post-WW2 greenfield housing or commercial developments pay sufficient tax to maintain the municipal services those developments require.
's a rare case in America where post-WW2 greenfield housing or commercial developments pay sufficient tax to maintain the municipal services those developments require.
that is the strongtowns message but it is false. suburbs have existed since the streetcars and in that time added rebuilt the roads many time added and replaced many pipes. If you assume everything needs to be replaced every 20 years as accounting depreciation does it can look like the money isn’t there but most things last longer and even where they don’t it is often only a partial replacement needed and so the rebuild is much cheaper.
I’m not an expert, but I did just listen to a podcast on this (which basically make me an expert, right?)
I think yes, technically, legally the federal government could. ‘Kelo v. City Of New London’ ruled that purely economic development was a sufficient justification for eminent domain. The reaction by most states was to make their own laws limiting eminent domain powers so that the Kelo situation couldn’t happen with the state government, but the federal government has never passed laws limiting its powers. Bills to limit federal power like S.1313 were introduced but never passed.
You also now qualify to to teach college in the state of Florida
They might be over-qualified, actually.
Link to podcast?
The Prosecutors: Legal Briefs, episode 117.
The show is hosted by two prosecutors, so in various episodes on criminal cases their opinions skew heavily pro-prosecutor, but when laying out facts like going through a SCOTUS case they tend to be more fact based and less opinion based, I have found.
Just finished listening and have to say that was incredibly bias and wilfully withholding discussion. The obvious other part to me is “just compensation”, that’s the right that is being provided in the amendment. But they never discuss that, they focus only on “public use” - which while can be discussed shouldn’t be the only avenue of discussion. And they continually talk as if Kelo’s property was taken without compensation. I know prosecutors are supposed to argue their case and ignore everything else, and that’s what they did. That was certainly not an academic exercise to present and discuss all information. I certainly won’t be subscribing to them.
They talked about just compensation, but the change and precedent provided by the Kelo case was in the lowering of the standard for taking. The case also set the precedent that the government could take private land not just for public use, but to transfer that land to another private party. Thus the focus on that. Compensation or not, the land was taken against the owner’s will for the purpose of enriching a corporation.
If they covered compensation it was so brief (and lopsided) that I missed it. I think over half the point of that phrase of the amendment was about compensation. But all they said was take take take take private take private take. It was overwhelmingly horribly biased for what they wanted. IMHO take isn’t even the right word because that implies taking without compensation, which there was. If you consider them balanced for scotus and biased for the rest, holy shit.
It is called the Takings Clause by
Please no.
Urban sprawl is terrible for the environment. We should never build another city, ever, globally.
I think you’re missing that the US federal government already owns a lot of land, so they don’t really need to seize any land if they want to do that.
