Safe bet that there are plenty of nice empty houses in the areas they’ve decided to keep. Many of them already owned by the government on tax foreclosures. Shouldn’t be any trouble providing housing (even much better housing) for the displaced. Cheaper to rehab some houses for the displaced than to maintain services to the few homes still occupied in the areas due for bulldozing.

Thanks, I figured if anyone knew you would.

Perhaps the way to look at it is in terms of the potential sources of such an obligation on the city. There could certainly be state law or a municipal ordinance obliging the city to provide or maintain such services. That seems to have been the situation in United States v. Fifty Acres of Land, 706 F.2d 1356 (5th Cir. 1983), aff’d, 469 U.S. 24 (1984), where a municipality argued it was obliged to replace a landfill it provided after the United States took the property, although neither the Fifth Circuit nor the Supreme Court addressed the question of whether such an obligation existed (they both assumed for sake of argument that it was so obliged).

Let’s also note that we’re not talking about whether there’s an obligation to provide new municipal services, but the removal of an existing municipal service. Even if there isn’t a substantive state law entitlement, if state law provides Mr. and Mrs. Holdout with a property interest in utilities and roads, that might be enough to trigger the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of due process before termination of the service. In Memphis Light, Gas & Water Div. v. Craft, 436 U.S. 1 (1978), for example, a public utility attempted to cut off the plaintiff’s gas service (for present purposes, one could as easily read “water”). Since Tennessee law didn’t allow public utilities to terminate service “at will” when there were bona fide disputes about charges, however, the supreme Court
the plaintiffs had a state-recognized property interest in receiving electricity, which in turn entitled them to due process before termination of service. Id., at 11-12; see also Myers v. City of Alcoa, 752 F.2d 196 (6th Cir. 1985). Of course, due process only obliges the state to provide Mr. Holdout with notice and a hearing – it isn’t a substantive entitlement, and I can fairly guess which way the decision will go.

If the answer to your question is “no,” then in this unique kind of taking, I suppose that the government doing the taking doesn’t ultimately need to force the person out – it can simply give them a hobson’s choice!

I wonder if cities are required to provide roads and water. Say you’re a hold-out. Can the city or county leave you where you are but tear up the roads, pull out the pipes and leave you isolated within the greenbelt?