Tomorrow marks 20 years to the day since the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 5-4 Kelo v. City of New London decision, which the Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm which represented homeowner Susette Kelo, recently described as the court’s “most universally despised opinion in modern memory.” In ruling that “economic development” constitutes a legitimate “public use” for the purposes of government eminent domain power, the court sanctioned the practice of governments forcibly taking private property and handing it over to another private party with more political pull, thereby striking at the heart of property rights which were so critical to the founding and success of our nation.
The case sprung from pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s decision to build a plant in New London, Connecticut, and its subsequent efforts to obtain 15 properties in the adjacent Fort Trumbull neighborhood, including Suzette Kelo’s little pink house. To add insult to injury, Pfizer abandoned its plan just a few years after the Kelo decision, just as its tax breaks were about to expire and after about $80 million of taxpayer money was spent, and the land remains a vacant lot all these years later. This is a fate that has befallen too many supposed “economic development” projects.
While the public backlash of the Kelo decision spawned property rights reforms in 47 states through legislation and court decisions, many of those reforms have lacked any real teeth. Oftentimes, they leave a loophole for eminent domain of properties deemed to be “blight,” a term once reserved for properties so dangerous that they had to be removed for public safety reasons, but now used so broadly as to include merely an eyesore, a property in an area designated as “economically disadvantaged” – or any other reason that serves the central planning purposes of government officials and politically connected developers.
Concentrating such power into the hands of a privileged few, combined with a collective apathy over gradual erosions of these liberties over the years, has inevitably led the protector of liberties and property rights to become the chief violator of these unalienable rights. After all, if the government can take your property without your consent for virtually any reason, how much do you really own your property?
Though these pages were often critical of Gov. Jerry Brown’s policies, he is to be given credit for leading the charge to eliminate the state’s redevelopment agencies, some of the most egregious abusers of eminent domain. Some in the Legislature have been trying to bring redevelopment back, often in what they say is a nicer, less egregious form. Don’t fall for it.
A version of this editorial was first published in 2015
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