Kelo Needs to be Reversed

[JimBowie1958]

?Kelo? Revisited | The Weekly Standard

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling that the city of New London and a nonprofit quasi-public entity that the city had set up, then called the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), were entitled to seize, in a process known as eminent domain, the homes and businesses of Kelo, the Cristofaros, and five other nearby property owners in the name of “economic development” that would generate “new jobs and increased revenue,” in the words of since-retired Justice John Paul Stevens, author of the majority opinion.

That is, the city and the NLDC were entitled to condemn and then bulldoze people’s homes solely in order to have something else built on the land that would produce higher property taxes​—​such as the office buildings, luxury condos, five-star hotel, spacious conference center, a “river walk” to a brand-new marina, and high-end retail stores that were part of an elaborate “economic development” plan for Fort Trumbull that the NLDC had launched in 1997. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment bars governments from taking private property unless the taking is for a “public use.” Historically “public use,” as courts had interpreted it, meant a road, a bridge, a public school, or some other government structure. But in the Kelo decision, the High Court majority declared that “economic development” that would involve using eminent domain to transfer the property of one private owner to a different but more economically ambitious private owner​—​such as a hotel​—​qualified as a public use just as much as, say, a new city library.

The nationwide outrage that followed in the wake of the Kelo decision spanned from left to right and back again on the political spectrum. It didn’t help that one of the chief beneficiaries of the NLDC’s economic development plan would have been the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc.
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In 2008, after the nationwide real-estate bubble burst, the construction company, Boston-based Corcoran Jennison, that the NLDC had engaged to develop the site announced that it couldn’t obtain enough financing for the ambitious enterprise and pulled out. In 2009 Pfizer itself left New London, abandoning its new digs only eight years after the building had been completed. In 2010 Pfizer sold the New London facility for a reported $55 million​—​a small fraction of what it had spent to build it​—​to General Dynamics’s Groton-based Electric Boat division, a submarine manufacturer. Few of the 1,400 or so Pfizer employees who worked there had chosen to live in New London, so its contribution to the city’s economic base had always been questionable.

After Kelo, more than 40 state legislatures passed laws that banned or restricted the use of eminent domain for the purpose of economic rejuvenation, especially when it meant displacing homeowners. At least seven states amended their constitutions to ban the use of eminent domain for economic development, and some state courts explicitly rejected the Kelo ruling as precedent for interpreting those states’ own taking laws.
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In fact, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc​—​the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the now-retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (none of whom was a Bush appointee)​—​had dissented from Stevens’s majority opinion. It was the High Court’s liberal faction​—​Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the since-retired David Souter​—​along with swing-voter Anthony Kennedy​—​who had formed the narrow majority. O’Connor’s dissenting opinion was particularly scathing. “Today the Court abandons [the Fifth Amendment’s] long-held, basic limitation on government power,” she wrote. “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded, i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public​—​in the process.”...
The Berman and Kelo rulings affirmed a particular kind of liberal vision: that large-scale and intricate government plans trump individuals’ property rights. The Berman case involved a thriving department store in Southwest that could not in any way have been said to be a slum property and whose owners wanted it to stay where it was​—​just as Susette Kelo and the Cristofaros wanted to stay where they were. The only thing to be said for the Berman decision is that Southwest did eventually get rebuilt​—​although in a blockish, Brutalist fashion that made many architectural critics nostalgic for the old days of “blight.”..
During the five years since Pfizer left New London, the city has placed its hopes in two more grandiose plans for Fort Trumbull and its environs that never materialized, and it may be poised to embark on still another. The story of the Kelo case is in part the story of a city so desperate, so economically beleaguered, that it was willing to try anything to bring a few more residents, a few more revenue dollars into its boundaries....

Kelo was a libtard decision based on classic socialist thinking; take from some so that others may enjoy a better life.

The problem is, like Thatcher said, socialism works fine till you run out of other people's money, but now they can go from taking other peoples money to taking their property as well and handing that out to their political patronage machine.