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.
There a huge difference between cut and cover in a green field, vs cut and cover in an existing downtown. Huge. That’s if you can even do it in an existing downtown because of the road alignment and existing underground utilities. It’s really unlikely you can do cut and cover in an existing city and that’s the whole problem. Greenfield you can do with side slope instead of shoring, one story deep instead of two because you can plan out exits to not interfere with an existing road, and no conflicts with traffic/utilities/buildings/noise mitigation to snarl everything up. And when you get out of the planned core you can run it on the surface and still grade separate crossing, which is cheap.
I’m sorry but this is really twisting what I said. I didn’t say huge roads, I simply said roads (although I can see how that can be misread).
Huge (tall) offices are the whole point, you relocate big offices and lots of jobs. With easy access to subways. That does not mean car dependency. It’s actually the other way around, a bunch of short rise offices quickly become too far away from a subway line.
Nor did I say huge houses, I simply said houses. I could include apartments in there too.
Car dependency depends on the city design, it’s not inherent to the existence of offices and roads. And the whole point of a designed city is you can get the space for cheap subways and space for bike paths without having to cram them into an existing road system. The existing road system is the thorn in the way of subway, transit, trains, and bike paths. Trying to cram all this into existing road system usually doesn’t work, and if you can it gets to be extremely expensive for a subpar system.
This is not simply housing or a business park on the edge of an existing city which is usually done in car dependency sprawl style. I’m suggesting a new city.
Yeah you really seem to think I’m demanding sprawl when I’m not. I don’t know if your twisting is intentional or not but it’s at the point that I think I’m going to end this conversation. It’s really far from my original question anyway.