eminent domain
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/60minutes/main575343.shtml
Jim and Joanne Saleet are refusing to sell the home they’ve lived in for 38 years. They live in a quiet neighborhood of single-family houses in Lakewood, Ohio, just outside Cleveland.
The City of Lakewood is trying to use eminent domain to force the Saleets out to make way for more expensive condominiums. But the Saleets are telling the town, “Hell no! They won’t go.”
“The bottom line is this is morally wrong, what they’re doing here. This is our home. And we’re going to stay here. And I’m gonna fight them tooth and nail. I’ve just begun to fight,” says Jim Saleet.
[…]
But the condos can’t go up unless the city can remove the Saleets and their neighbors through eminent domain. And to legally invoke eminent domain, the city had to certify that this scenic park area is, really, “blighted.”
“We’re not blighted. This is an area that we absolutely love. This is a close-knit, beautiful neighborhood. It’s what America’s all about,” says Jim Saleet. “And, Mike, you don’t know how humiliating this is to have people tell you, ‘You live in a blighted area,’ and how degrading this is.”
“The term ‘blighted’ is a statutory word,” says Mayor Cain. “It is, it really doesn’t have a lot to do with whether or not your home is painted. …A statutory term is used to describe an area. The question is whether or not that area can be used for a higher and better use.”
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051003-122623-2136r.htm
Florida city considers eminent domain By Joyce Howard Price THE WASHINGTON TIMES October 3, 2005
Florida’s Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0509/p01s03-ussc.html
The local governments contend they’re creating bigger tax bases and more jobs to help the local economy. That’s the “public use.” But to critics it’s an unconstitutional abuse.
“Practically every house in the entire country would produce more jobs and taxes as an office building, and everybody’s small business would produce more jobs and taxes if it were removed and turned into a Costco,” says Dana Berliner, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. “If that’s all it takes, then your house or business can be up for grabs as soon as a some private business interest takes a fancy to it.”
The increase in the use of eminent domain for private entities has created a groundswell of opposition from New York and Detroit to California.
The Institute for Justice’s report documents dozens of instances of apparent abuse where states and local cities and towns put the interests of individual developers over longtime residents. For instance:
In Atlantic City, an entire black middle-class neighborhood was condemned and destroyed to make way for a tunnel to a new casino.
Bremerton, Washington removed a woman in her 80s from her home of 55 years for the claimed purpose of expanding a sewer plant, but gave her former home to an auto dealership.
West Palm Beach County in Florida condemned a family’s home so that the manager of a planned new golf course could live in it.
Many individuals are fighting the practice and the courts, which used to routinely rubber stamp local condemnations, are responding.
In 40 percent of the challenges to eminent domain brought between 1998 and 2002, courts sided with the original landowners. Six state legislatures have passed bills increasing protections for people threatened with eminent domain. Eleven others are considering such bills, including New York.
The practice of eminent domain has been abused throughout US history. When the railroads and many of the nation’s highways were built, landowners were often told their properties were condemned, given a dollar and told to go to court if they wanted their “just compensation.” But even using such high-handed tactics, most eminent-domain condemnations were used for clearly delineated public purposes.
In the early 1950s, a landmark case changed that. Washington, D.C., wanted to redevelop a rundown part of town. So it declared eminent domain and condemned the property by arguing that it constituted a public use by getting rid of the “blighted” area. The Supreme Court upheld the notion that it’s a public good to get rid of blight, but made no determination one way or the other on the appropriateness of handing the property to private developers.
“The Supreme Court gave ‘public use’ definition by saying it had to be of public purpose,” says Veronique Pluviose-Fenton, an attorney with National League of Cities. “Redeveloping brown fields can be seen as having a public use because it gets rid of an environmental hazard.”
It wasn’t until the booming 1990s - when real estate prices soared - that the practice of condemning property for private development really took off.
According to the Institute for Justice report, local governments went from condemning blighted areas to applying the practice to rundown neighborhoods. Then it began to be condemn properties in areas that looked just fine.