Mark T. Tomczak on Nostr: We do build highways. :) You chose an interesting example for personal reasons ...

We do build highways. :)

You chose an interesting example for personal reasons because I grew up west of Richmond Virginia. So let me tell you about the beltway. Tuck in; you've activated my trap card and I'd rather spin yarns than finish this performance review. 😉

Richmond had a beltway on the books for decades that would circle around the city to the east and to the west. They built out the east one with relatively low political turmoil, if I recall correctly; east of Richmond is mostly swamp and an airport.

To the west is Midlothian and Chesterfield, the places that white flight went *to* back in the Sixties and Seventies. A group of, let's say, entrepreneurs took a gamble: they bought a bunch of land in the 'redzone' where the highway was slated to be built for cheap (because it was slated to have a highway built through it), built upscale suburban housing developments (I will stop just short of calling them "mini-mansions," but they were delightfully-apportioned three-story works abutting a golf course), and sold them to the folk fleeing school integration.

By the time the state got the money and political will together to execute on the highway, the builders had cashed out, taken the money, and run (fine people; some of them were the parents of my classmates in school!), and the neighborhood was sitting there, smack dab in the middle of a "PLANNED FOR EMINENT DOMAIN" sector.

... but here's the thing about planning to eminent domain a whole-ass neighborhood of some of the wealthiest taxpayers and campaign contributors in one of the wealthier central-VA counties. 😉

The whole thing threatened to turn into a decades-long legal quagmire. These folk were willing to support any politician who would scuttle the highway project, and if none were, they were willing to pay for lawyers to fight the issue forever.

You want to know what ended the fight?

J.B. Watkins was the owner of the Watkins Tree Farm just east of those housing developments. Watkins is an Old Virginia Family Name. For those fair readers who don't know why I capitalize those words: Virginia has a tradition of noblesse oblige dating back to its founding by second-born mid-tier nobility who were never going to get land or title in their homeland, so their options were join the clergy, die nobly in war, or go to the New World. Yes, it's a paper thing and yes, it didn't stop or even mostly fight slavery... But it still matters. The Watkins Family Is Compelled To Serve. Like the Lees. Or the Fairfaxes. Or the Hopkinses.

Watkins went to the General Assembly and put his entire tree farm on the chopping block if they could re-route the highway through it. And he could do that because he was one guy who owned a lot of land.

Sometimes we build highways through single philanthropy too. 😉

(... I'm not actually disagreeing with your example, I just think it's funny that of all the examples we could have discussed, you stumbled on the one where the story I most know about it is "that time we built a highway because one dude let it happen" 😄 )