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Originally Posted by Onn
Expect I don't think the Founding Fathers ever wanted the city to be all that. They wanted it to be the most modest of cities.
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What you think hardly matters, because it's wrong. L'Enfant platted a city as large as London. His plan encompassed 20,272 lots; the median American household in 1790 had five persons, so even 7,000 houses would have been plenty sufficient to house the largest city in America.
Washington himself stood to profit immensely from a growing capital, not only through his (well, mostly the Custises') extensive local landholdings but through his investments in the Patowmack Canal project. Many other Federalists certainly seemed to believe in a bigger, more activist central government than many in today's GOP. I'm not typically one to make historically determinist arguments, but I think we can all safely say that the Jefferson/Jackson anti-Federalists eventually lost the economic and cultural arguments against large metropolitan areas.
Just over 1/10 of jobs in the Washington metropolitan area are for the federal government. The region has the highest share of computer/math occupations among major metros (20% higher than San Jose), more college students per capita than any other major metro, the 5th largest bioscience cluster in the US, topped the Inc. 500 list of fast-growing/mid-sized corporate headquarters for the past 15 years, and soon will edge out metro Los Angeles (which is more than twice as populous) as having the second largest population of postgraduate educated adults in the country.
This region is not some parasite feeding off the nation. The Federalist founding fathers knew that a strong capital and a strong federal government would help build the wealth, power, and strength of the entire nation.
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Much of the stuff going on in DC today is anything but modest.
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Huh? I've never heard anyone call DC's boring bland boxes too showy before. Rome or Dubai before the fall, this ain't. Heck, just midtown Manhattan has infinitely more architectural ostentation under construction right now, and its principal industry is arguably even more parasitic than government.
As for CityCenter, this is a development 20+ years in the making. Yes, it's several buildings, but even taken together they'd fit into any ONE of the towers under construction at the World Trade Center site.