PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Probably only if that city was a new planned capitol like the CBC has suggested be developed on the Republican River.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Probably only if that city was a new planned capitol like the CBC has suggested be developed on the Republican River.
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 month ago
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.
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A new downtown would make a subway very easy to build. Cheeeeaaaappp land for huge offices 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 cheap and long term expensive.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.