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.
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.