All long-distance transport construction requires "confiscating" land. Somehow it's completely routine to take huge swathes of land for freeway widening, but build one little train line and everyone loses their minds.
There is a pretty substantial difference between eminent domaining the land required for rail, and taking much more than necessary so that the state can flip it for a profit.
Money is fungible, it's pretty unreasonable to say that a given housing development is required because the state needs money to fund a railway. They could raise taxes or what have you. (My preferred solution would be land value tax, which would make the railway self-funding, but that's a bigger argument).
Well, in the real word eminent domain literally is routinely used to hand the land to developers to profit from. Famously, shopping malls, but any development can be framed as an economic benefit.
I hate when people seem to justify handing private land to private developers to build a shopping mall for profit but get the vapors when it’s the public wanting to build a subway. Same as the conservatives who did bush v gore and then get the vapors when the other side wants its calvinball relief when the circumstances justify it.
The slippery slope is real and once you open the bloodgates to private interests you really ought to open it to others as well. Like draw me a coherent line as to why a developer sucking up land via eminent domain should be legally allowed but the public building a train is not. If you want to argue the former should be rolled back then fine but that’s a thing that will ruffle numerous feathers, and in the meantime we have a public who’s tapping their watch waiting for the train.
Abstract disagreement with the legislative and legal realities doesn’t make the existence of eminent domain for speculation or the calvinball court ruling any less of a concrete power. This is a thing we do, and if you want to campaign to end eminent domain then fine but right now the law says we can eminent domain it, develop it, and sell it.
I dont think it is as routine as you think and citizens typically get completely outraged by actions like Kelo v. New London, and are far more OK with eminent domain for public infrastructure. Do you really think public sentiment is the opposite?
>Like draw me a coherent line as to why a developer sucking up land via eminent domain should be legally allowed but the public building a train is not
My whole point is that building a train is a legitimate use (IMO), but taking the adjacent land just to sell to developers make the state money is not.
there is also a difference between "much more to flip for profit" and "a reasonable amount to sustainability run a railway system". People don't want to pay more taxes, so having a self sufficient system would be preferable one to one that constantly requires taxpayer funding.
Taxes or fares are a sustainable ways to run a railway system.
It isnt about sustainability, it is about who pays, and the public not wanting to pay for something you use isnt a good enough reason size private property from a small number of individuals.
By that logic, we could do away with taxes entirely if the state simply confiscated everything it needed form select individuals.
Yes if we take the logic to ridiculous ends we can have the state confiscate everything it needs from select individuals, but the problem with that is that it's ridiculous. it's absurd. we can use different logic in different places.
using eminent domain to get land for a shop attached to a train station isn't a slippery slope to the cops coming in and confiscating your car just because they want it.
Taxes and fares aren't enough to run a transportation system properly because of politics and culture.
It was abandoned because they made the mistake of trying to build it through South Pasadena which is very wealthy and full of politically connected old money families that didn't want anything to do with that kind of traffic. They dragged Caltrans through decades of lawsuits and Caltrans spent who knows how many millions on property in the area so I don't know if eminent domain was really an option, at least not in the 21st century. Their last ditch attempt was going to be a tunnel that cost >$1 billion per mile but the city shut that down fast too, even though it wouldn't have required seizing any land.
Source: South Pasadena is my home town and I left shortly after Caltrans officially gave up. The year after Caltrans dropped the project altogether, a massive chunk of the city's budget was reallocated back to the schools and roads which made a huge difference to the infrastructure.
This reminds me of what happened in Sydney, Australia. Sydney has this freeway (the M4, formerly the F4) which starts in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, the western edge of the Sydney metro area, around 55 km west of the city centre. And it heads due east, towards the centre of the city. And they built the western portions of the freeway first, since the land acquisition costs were cheap. By the late 1970s, it finished 15 km short of the city centre. And the government had acquired the land to continue it to the edge of the city centre, another 13 km or so. But a lot of local residents didn't want the freeway built. So in 1977, the recently elected centre-left Neville Wran government decided not just to cancel its construction, but also sell the land reservation to property developers to ensure it never could be built.
Did that actually stop its construction? No. The state government ended up building the eastern section anyway, starting in 2019, and it opened in 2023. But the surface reservation had been lost, and reacquiring it through eminent domain would have been prohibitively expensive due to high property prices, and politically too controversial too, so it had to go through a tunnel. A surface freeway would have cost AU$1–3 billion, with underground tunnelling the cost was well over AU$15 billion (around US$10 billion)
Wran's 1977 decision to sell the freeway land reservation was arguably one of the most expensive decisions ever made in Australian history. In the long-run it had made life worse for local residents, as the freeway dumped commuter traffic 15 km short of its primary destination, and they had to put up with that traffic traversing their local roads–which made the eventual completion of the freeway almost inevitable
Is the solution to build things through poorer neighborhoods where people still feel exactly the same but can't stand up for themselves?
The issue wasn't that they tried to put the freeway where someone didn't want it because nobody wants a freeway nextdoor, the issue is they tried to force it upon people who could fight back.
> Is the solution to build things through poorer neighborhoods where people still feel exactly the same but can't stand up for themselves?
Pretty much. The history of US highway construction is full of politicians using freeways to bulldoze and split poor communities. That's how the euphemism "urban renewal" got its name.
I was saying that you get paid approximately market rate, which makes it obviously not merely "confiscation", ergo using scare quotes "confiscation" to describe eminent domain is pretty reasonable.
