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.
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.
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.
I’m not an expert, but I did just listen to a podcast on this (which basically makes 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 using the takings power (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.
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.
Please no.
Urban sprawl is terrible for the environment. We should never build another city, ever, globally.
