An imminent eminent domain case
I was reading the Denver Post the other day and was alerted to an interesting Supreme Court case. It deals with eminent domain, something that has come under increasing controversy in the last thirty years.
"Eminent domain" is the right of a state or local government (or any government, really) to take private land for public use. The right of eminent domain in the United States comes from the Fifth Amendment, which states (among other things), "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The Supreme Court case that will be argued on Feb. 22 is called Kelo v. City of New London (04-108). (Link goes to Connecticut Supreme Court opinion.) New London is a city in Connecticut which seized private land with the purpose of redeveloping it into commercial and residential space which would, ostensibly, create higher tax revenues over the years. These increased tax revenues are the "public use" to which the land is being put.
Property owners whose property was to be seized sued the state on the grounds that the "furtherance of a significant economic development plan" does not constitute a "public use" of the land. The petitioners, Kelo et al., objected to the New London Development Corporation's argument that "economic development constitutes a valid public use under the takings clauses of the state and federal constitutions, and that these takings will sufficiently benefit the public and bear reasonable assurances of future public use." The key issue here is whether or not it can be assured that destroying existing property and giving it to someone else will assure increased tax revenues. Here in Mentor, the city agreed to destroy several historic buildings to make way for a Walgreen's drug store. The Walgreen's closed a year later, leaving an empty building and a bunch of historic buildings that were ultimately destroyed without purpose.
In the last thirty years, it's been a pastime for local governments to exercise their power of eminent domain, taking private land, and then turning it over to private developers who would otherwise be unable to get their hands on it. These local governments should stop beating around the bush and admit that they're selling out to private developers, misusing a special power that no other entity in a city has -- the power of eminent domain.
As Al Knight points out in his Denver Post editorial, "the court has taken the New London case and, more often than not, it reverses state courts that get too aggressive in their reading of prior U.S. Supreme Court decisions." Hopefully the Supreme Court will put an end to this shady and illegal misuse of eminent domain once and for all. Watch here for more details.
Comments
One of the things I find interesting about this case is how it demonstrates a mission creep regarding use of emininent domain. Leaving aside for the moment the issue of what's Constitutional and what's not, there's a question of basic fairness: what "public benefit" is great enough to cause private harm?
Eminent domain first came into widespread, institutional use when the country's transportation infrastructure needs prompted government to seize large amounts of land for railway beds and, eventually, Interstate highways. As Douglas Adams put it, "people living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there." Nonetheless, the interests of thousands of motorists from Cleveland and Buffalo trump the interests of a few landowners inbetween, thus the loss of poor Willoughby's pastoral charm beneath cold, antiseptic I-90. The modern innovation has brought us all a little closer to the James A. Garfield Birthplace National Historic Site, but at what price progress?
The next major use of eminent domain, as I understand it, was the massive slums-clearing movement of the 1950s, replacing rundown, three-story, squalid tenements, owned by unfeeling landlords, in poor (read: black-and-getting-blacker) parts of town, with modern, twenty-story, squalid tenements owned by the city's public housing department. Although the residents of these slums, at the time, complained that the new high-rises were destroying their neighborhoods, white suburbanites and condominium-owners, who plainly knew better, were able to override such opposition.
Sarcasm aside, the two chief uses of eminent domain in the middle part of the last century -- aside from the occasional war memorial auditorum waiting for the advent of corporate naming rights -- were clearly intended to replace something nearly valueless (i.e. a 500-foot-wide stretch of farmland that nobody will really miss, or an old ethnic neighborhood that all the white ethnics have moved out of) with something of great value (i.e. Interstate 90, or shiny new vertical slums to keep minorities out of the new white ethnic neighborhood).
Flash forward to the 1990s, though, and things like this New London project come up. The difference is that eminent domain is now being used to take property from one set of private landowners and give it to another. The city won't be running the new Fort Trumbull; some private developer will. The argument being used here is that increased tax revenues will benefit us all, possibly including the former Fort Trumbull homeowners.
When I started writing this comment, I had it clear in my mind that the Supremes should decide against New London, as this is clearly a stretch of eminent domain from seizure-for-public-benefit to seizure-for-private-enrichment. But ... I'm finding it very difficult to draw the line where one ends and the other begins.
New London's not that much different from the argument employed by cities that use eminent domain to build stadia that wlil primarily benefit the billionaires who run professional sports -- it's just a matter of who's holding the deed. It seems to me that a decision for Kelo would call into question the very practice of eminent domain. How do you prove that a new highway will provide more economic stimulus than a new shopping center? How do you make the case that building public housing is OK, but constructing higher-end condos to serve a different segment of the market is not OK?
Or does it come down, simply, to who's holding the deed?
Posted by: MB | December 31, 2004 2:53 PM
this is noe enough information!!!!
Posted by: kristina | January 31, 2006 6:55 AM