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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.