Government Development Turns Into an Empty Lot
November 14, 2009 · By Jonathan McLeod
Kelo.
For those who follow eminent domain abuses by the governments and the courts, the name Kelo will always be associated with injustice. A brief history:
The council of New London CT decided it wanted to rebuild a neighbourhood, Fort Trumbull. It wasn’t a blighted neighbourhood, but the local government felt they could put it to better use than the owners and residents. They attempted to buy all the land, but not everyone wanted to leave. Susette Kelo didn’t want to leave.
The city decided to use its power through eminent domain to appropriate the land. Eminent domain allows the government to take private property in order to put it to “public use”. In this situation, economic development – in the form of creating an urban village of shops and residential units, as well luring Pfizer to set up shop right next door – was deemed “public use”.
Eminent domain law in the United States was not clearly defined. Kelo was not the first case to contest this sort of theft, and the supreme court had a history of being deferential to the whims of government. Property rights meant nothing. Even the English language seemed to be of little value; “public use” came to mean “public transfer of land from one private entity to another private entity”.
Kelo, decided in June 2005, was an offence against liberty. It was unjust. It was sad.
Unfortunately, the sadness continues. Fort Trumbull, nearly a decade after the decision to re-develop it, is barren. It’s vacant lot. Worse, on Thursday Pfizer decided to pull out of New London. Their grand building will be empty and 1400 jobs will disappear. There are, perhaps, all sorts of lessons to be learned. Most of which revolve around the effects of government meddling in economic ordering. Still, as Megan McArdle writes, “[b]ut it’s not really that tempting to gloat, because this is a pretty tragic disaster for New London.”
Reason has a nice round up of Kelo here.
when the government can trample any freedom for any reason we are not free. i think it was jefferson who said the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. we in the west seem be approaching that point. pc bs is rampant and any reason to curtain individual freedom is used. for those who are not aware we in canada do not have property rights period.
As someone who has worked in a field closely associated with private land ownership, I watched the Kelo case with some interest, and of course my interest was renewed with this latest twist in the saga. It’s sad but somehow appropriate that Kelo et al lost their homes to prove a point, that being, that not even the Supreme Court can tell the future, no promises are worth more than the paper they’re written on, and that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush every time. New London sought to increase the public good by doling out public money and using the coercive power of government to trade up on it’s existing tax base against the taxpayer’s wishes, and ended up with nothing. One hopes that other jurisdictions have taken note.