From StamfordPlus.com

Republican Party-endorsed candidate for Connecticut Attorney General Martha Dean has announced her plan to push for further reforms of the state’s eminent domain laws. Dean’s announcement comes in the wake of the fifth anniversary of the Kelo v. New London case that ultimately made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dean said, “It has now been five years since the New London homeowners lost their homes in the Kelo eminent domain case, and what is there to show for these property owners’ government-imposed loss?”

“The homes in New London’s Fort Trumbull area that were taken by the government for development sit vacant with weeds growing where there were once lawns and gardens,” she said. “The city development authority’s plans for redevelopment were focused on Pfizer’s long-term commitment to the area, yet Pfizer has moved away and taxpayers are being forced to pay $35 million to entice another company to move into Pfizer’s now-abandoned offices.”

“As Attorney General I will propose reforming Connecticut’s eminent domain laws to ensure that the type of eminent domain abuse that was allowed to occur in New London cannot reoccur,” Dean said.

Dean points out that that eminent domain was traditionally limited to public projects that would actually be used by the public, such as town halls, school buildings, roads, libraries, and so forth. But starting in the 1950’s, the term “public use” was interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s justices to include the condemnation of private property to correct blighted urban areas.

Dean said this trend has morphed into the full scale effort by cities and states to condemn private property that is not blighted but which, with the help of taxpayers’ money, would lead to private development that could generate more tax revenue. She continued, “The past 60 years have seen the growth of an approach to eminent domain and property rights that is bad public policy for a number of reasons, the most important of which is that when states and cities condemn private property in order to generate more tax revenue and improve the appearance of areas that are not blighted, they trample on the most fundamental rights of citizens to peaceably enjoy their property.”

“While Connecticut’s eminent domain laws were modified after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo in an effort to prevent further abuse, many believe those amendments do not go far enough,” Dean said. “We in Connecticut must make it the policy of this State to protect the private property rights of Connecticut’s citizens by limiting the eminent domain to situations where the property is put to actual public use, as most people understand that concept, and is essential to that particular use. We must end the process of taking private property simply to hand it over to people and companies with more money.”

She added, “The duties of the Attorney General include making legislative proposals, providing opinions on the constitutionality of proposed legislation and, at times, existing law, and otherwise protecting Connecticut citizens from an abuse of state authority. These are responsibilities that I will take very seriously as Connecticut’s next Attorney General.”

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From My South End

Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that has taken no action to restrain eminent domain-the government’s ability to seize property rights with due monetary compensation but without the owner’s consent-after the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision finding eminent domain for private use constitutional. It seems self-evident that forcibly taking property from one owner and giving it to another for financial gain is unfair-even un-American; yet, our legislature seems reluctant to take up the Court’s suggestion that states may enact their own restrictions. The reason is a lingering-but mistaken-belief that eminent domain is an indispensable tool for economic development and tax base enhancement.

But the opposite is true. The evidence has been clear since 1964, when Martin Anderson, then with MIT/Harvard’s Joint Center for Urban Studies, published a book titled The Federal Bulldozer, an analysis of the economic impacts of eminent domain as used in urban renewal. He provided clear documentation that in the years since private-benefit eminent domain became government policy in 1949, it had cost the taxpayers hugely more than it produced, and boded to remain a liability for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Boston is today still pock-marked with several hundred acres of land taken, cleared and held tax-exempt by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, land where people and businesses would have supported vibrant community life and paid taxes for these forty or fifty years. Eminent domain drove out residents, broke up communities, and decimated the small-business base.

In 2008, a Wall Street Journal editorial discussed a study by a private organization, Institute for Justice, which found no discernable hindrance to economic activity from the restriction of eminent domain, even in states implementing the strongest reforms after Kelo. The Journal agreed with the report, noting that although developers like to get land the government forces sellers to give up at cheap prices, and politicians like to play power games picking winners and losers, projects that can’t stand on their own shouldn’t be propped up by the taxpayers.

In 2009, William J. Stern, who ran the New York State Urban Development Corporation’s Times Square redevelopment project, wrote a report revealing that eminent domain “delayed development, added tremendous cost, and was unfair and inefficient”-and fraught with corruption.

It’s only logical that eminent domain-like other unfair public subsidies-would have negative effects. First, this kind of government intervention props up bad business plans and encourages overblown, risky projects that would be weeded out by the private markets, often leaving the city to clean up a big mess. Aside from the empty lots scarring the city, Filenes, Columbus Center and North Point are three recent grandiose local plans that were given all sorts of land, regulatory and tax favors, only to collapse of their own overreaching weight. Pfizer, the corporation for which the City of New London seized and destroyed Suzette Kelo’s home and neighborhood, recently decided “nevermind,” and moved out of town altogether, showing again, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “the futility of eminent domain as corporate welfare.” Read Nicole Gelinas’s City Journal story of the Atlantic Yards project in New York, where decay and disinvestment are the result of “a half-decade’s worth of government-created uncertainty, which stopped genuine private investment in its tracks.” We started to see tenants leaving and building maintenance neglected in the Fenway ten years ago, when a large swath of the neighborhood was declared blighted (or “potentially” blighted!) because the Red Sox team owners wanted to relocate the ballpark and fill its current site with profitable towers. Eminent domain costs the taxpayers money up front in takings compensation, and then for unpredictable periods of time in the loss of taxpaying properties. It destroys organically evolved communities and tries to replace them wholesale with artificial aggregates of buildings and people that don’t fit into the context and lack the interstitial tissue to function cohesively. And it end-runs the competitive markets, putting decisions into the hands of politicians with short-term political and financial goals, and engenders corruption, cronyism, and influence-peddling. Eminent domain is bad government and bad business.

As the WSJ reminds us, private development went along very nicely for centuries before politicians decided to take property from one person for the benefit of another. As Stern learned from his Times Square experience, “There was no shortage of developers willing to acquire property the old-fashioned way-through the private market.”

In today’s climate of economic distress, politicians are especially vulnerable to the fear-mongering lobbyists’s argument that we mustn’t lose any tool that could stimulate the economy. But the facts on eminent domain should liberate our elected officials to do the right thing-if that’s what they want to do. They should act now to eliminate private-benefit eminent domain, both by legislation and by constitutional amendment, to get government out of the business of business, let the competitive market determine development, and use scarce public money for real public needs.

The Judiciary Committee just heard several bills that would prohibit eminent domain for other than the traditional public uses-schools, parks, roads, etc. House Bill 1778 in particular serves the purpose well: it contains no “blight” loopholes, and would also prevent eminent domain taking of public land for private use.

Write to your legislators before March 17, the Committee decision date, and tell them to pass H. 1778. More important, tell them to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting private-use eminent domain at the Constitutional Convention scheduled for July 29. Without this amendment, each politically wired developer will simply get a new law passed that allows for a taking s/he wants, “notwithstanding any other laws to the contrary.”

The last word, again from the Wall Street Journal: “If there is a lesson from Connecticut’s misfortune, it is that economic development that relies on the strong arm of government will never be the kind to create sustainable growth.”

Shirley Kressel is a landscape architect and urban designer, and one of the founders of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods. She can be reached at Shirley.Kressel@verizon.net.

From Chron.com

Amtrak riders passing through New London, Conn., can catch an odd sight in an otherwise picturesque New England setting: a fancy corporate center standing next to a street grid emptied of nearly all its buildings. This used to be the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, a working class enclave that would have been largely forgotten had it not been central to a controversial 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain — the government’s right to take private property for public use.

New London had wanted to replace the area’s weathered cottages and auto-body shops with a cityscape more amenable to the corporate types at the new Pfizer research park. The city bought some of the properties and seized those whose owners refused to sell.

The old neighborhood is now gone, and soon Pfizer will be too. The multinational drug company just announced plans to close its New London facility. It expects to complete the withdrawal by 2011, just when its tax deal with the city runs out. So much for those pretty architectural drawings of high-end condos, restaurants, offices and marina.

How many American cities and towns have turned themselves inside out to attract and keep the big corporation? And how many later learned that their heroic efforts to please went largely unreciprocated? What municipal leaders often see as their economic salvation the corporation regards as but one piece on a global chessboard.

New London extended Pfizer a handsome deal whereby the company would pay taxes on only 20 percent of its property’s assessed value for 10 years. (Other local taxpayers made up the difference.) The company received a $5 million grant for engineering work.

Fort Trumbull had long lived with the smells from a nearby sewage treatment plant, but the city fixed that for Pfizer. The neighbors’ ability to share the sweeter air was short-lived, due to the $75 million plan to turn their area into a waterfront district for fancier folk.

The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution lets government seize private property for public purposes — such as roads or military bases — as long as owners are fairly compensated. But the definition of public use had been expanded to include giving condemned property to other private owners in the name of economic development. In its famous 1981 Poletown decision, the Michigan Supreme Court permitted Detroit to condemn an old neighborhood for a General Motors factory.

The Fort Trumbull property owners and their supporters asked the Supreme Court to stop that practice. Some of the holdouts had not cared for the city’s offer. Then there were old-timers, such as 86-year-old Wilhelmina Dery, who wanted to die in the house where she was born. No price was right for her. To the distress of many, the justices decided against the property owners. And what a bittersweet victory that’s become for the city.

Some in New London have comforted themselves with the thought that even if Pfizer empties its building, the company still has to pay tax on the property. They should know that when Pfizer closed a campus in Ann Arbor, Mich., two years ago, it promptly asked the city to cut its tax assessment in half. It eventually sold the complex to the University of Michigan, which as an educational institution pays no real-estate taxes.

New London remains blessed by fine old architecture, a waterfront setting and a choice location between New York and Boston. It will reinvent itself. In the meantime, it must live with this huge irony: Two years hence, the auto-body shops banished from Fort Trumbull would have been employing more people in New London than the pharmaceuticals giant they were sacrificed for.

Harrop can be e-mailed at fharrop@projo.com.

From the Associated Press

NEW LONDON, Conn. — Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation’s most notorious eminent domain project.

There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

Proponents of the ambitious plan blame the sour economy. Opponents call it a “poetic justice.”

“They are getting what they deserve. They are going to get nothing,” said Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff in the landmark property rights case. “I don’t think this is what the United States Supreme Court justices had in mind when they made this decision.”

Kelo’s iconic pink home sat for more than a century on that currently empty lot, just steps away from Connecticut’s quaint but economically distressed Long Island Sound waterfront. Shortly after she moved in, in 1997, her house became ground zero in the nation’s best-known land rights catfight.

New London officials decided they needed Kelo’s land and the surrounding 90 acres for a multimillion-dollar private development that included residential, hotel conference, research and development space and a new state park that would compliment a new $350 million Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility.

Kelo and six other homeowners fought for years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, justices voted 5-4 against them, giving cities across the country the right to use eminent domain to take property for private development.

The decision was sharply criticized and created grassroots backlash. Forty states quickly passed new, protective rules and regulations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some protesters even tried to turn the tables on now-retired Justice David Souter, trying unsuccessfully in 2006 to take his New Hampshire home by eminent domain to build an inn.

In New London the city’s prized economic development plan has fallen apart as the economy crumbled.

The Corcoran Jennison Cos., a Boston-based developer, had originally locked in exclusive rights to develop nearly the entire northern half of the Fort Trumbull peninsula.

But those rights expired in June 2008, despite multiple extensions, because the firm was unable to secure financing, according to President Marty Jones.

In July, backers halted fundraising for the project’s crown jewel, a proposed $60 million, 60,000-square-foot Coast Guard museum.

The poor economy meant that donations weren’t “keeping pace with expenses,” said Coast Guard Foundation president Anne Brengle.

The group hopes to resume fundraising in the future, she said.

Overall, proponents say about two-thirds of the 90-acre site is developed, in part because of a 16-acre, $25 million state park. The other third of the land remains without the promised residential housing, office buildings, shops and hotel/conference center facility.

“If there had been no litigation, which took years to work its way through (the court system), then a substantial portion of this project would be constructed by now,” said John Brooks, executive director of the New London Development Corp. “But we are victims of the economic cycle, and there is nothing we can do about that.”

A new engineering tenant is moving into one of the office buildings at 1 Chelsea St., and a bio tech firm with as many as five employees is getting ready to move into an existing building on Howard Street, Brooks said.

Kelo, paid $442,000 by the state for her old property, now lives across the Thames River in Groton, in a white, two-bedroom 1950s bungalow. Her beloved pink house was sold for a dollar and moved less than two miles away, where a local preservationist has refurbished it.

Kelo can see her old neighborhood from her new home, but she finds the view too painful to bear.

“Everything is different, but everything is like still the same,” said Kelo, who works two jobs and has largely maintained a low profile since moving away. “You still have life to deal with every day of the week. I just don’t have eminent domain to deal with every day of the week, even after I ate, slept and breathed it for 10 years.”

Although her side lost, Kelo said she sees the wider ramifications of her property rights battle.

“In the end it was seven of us who fought like wild animals to save what we had,” she said. “I think that though we ultimately didn’t win for ourselves, it has brought attention to what they did to us, and if it can make it better for some other people so they don’t lose their homes to a Dunkin’ Donuts or a Wal-Mart, I think we did some good.”

Scott Bullock, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, argued Kelo’s case before the Supreme Court. He calls “massive changes that have happened in the law and in the public consciousness” the “real legacy” of Kelo and the other plaintiffs.

The empty land means the city won a “hollow victory,” he said.

“What cities should take from this is to run fleeing from what New London did and do economic development that is market-driven and incorporate properties of folks who are truly committed to their neighborhood and simply want to be a part of what happens,” he said.

From the Brownstoner

Via a Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn press release, news that Daniel Goldstein et al. filed their appeal brief on Friday in the New York State Court of Appeals as part of their ongoing challenge to the state’s use of eminent domain for Atlantic Yards. “This case provides an opportunity for the New York Court of Appeals to reject Kelo and continue its proud tradition of interpreting this State’s Constitution in a manner that affords more protection to individual rights and liberties,” said Matthew Brinckerhoff, a lawyer representing the nine property owners in the case. We look forward to the argument in October.” The entire brief can be found here.