Posted on 06/23/2005 8:07:27 AM PDT by Stew Padasso
Supreme Court rules cities may seize homes
HOPE YEN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A divided Supreme Court ruled that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth conflicts with individual property rights.
Thursday's 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.
As a result, cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.
Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.
"The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including - but by no means limited to - new jobs and increased tax revenue," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
He was joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
At issue was the scope of the Fifth Amendment, which allows governments to take private property through eminent domain if the land is for "public use."
Susette Kelo and several other homeowners in a working-class neighborhood in New London, Conn., filed suit after city officials announced plans to raze their homes for a riverfront hotel, health club and offices.
New London officials countered that the private development plans served a public purpose of boosting economic growth that outweighed the homeowners' property rights, even if the area wasn't blighted.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has been a key swing vote on many cases before the court, issued a stinging dissent. She argued that cities should not have unlimited authority to uproot families, even if they are provided compensation, simply to accommodate wealthy developers.
The lower courts had been divided on the issue, with many allowing a taking only if it eliminates blight.
"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," O'Connor wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."
She was joined in her opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Nationwide, more than 10,000 properties were threatened or condemned in recent years, according to the Institute for Justice, a Washington public interest law firm representing the New London homeowners.
New London, a town of less than 26,000, once was a center of the whaling industry and later became a manufacturing hub. More recently the city has suffered the kind of economic woes afflicting urban areas across the country, with losses of residents and jobs.
The New London neighborhood that will be swept away includes Victorian-era houses and small businesses that in some instances have been owned by several generations of families. Among the New London residents in the case is a couple in their 80s who have lived in the same home for more than 50 years.
City officials envision a commercial development that would attract tourists to the Thames riverfront, complementing an adjoining Pfizer Corp. research center and a proposed Coast Guard museum.
New London was backed in its appeal by the National League of Cities, which argued that a city's eminent domain power was critical to spurring urban renewal with development projects such Baltimore's Inner Harbor and Kansas City's Kansas Speedway.
Under the ruling, residents still will be entitled to "just compensation" for their homes as provided under the Fifth Amendment. However, Kelo and the other homeowners had refused to move at any price, calling it an unjustified taking of their property.
The case is Kelo et al v. City of New London, 04-108.
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
"Folks, make sure you know who your city council, mayor's, township supervisors, township boards, and planning commission's buddies are. Your home may depend on it."
I'm doomed, then.
After I moved here a couple of years ago, my local government (by orders of the school district) decided they would double the taxes of anyone who's moved in during the past couple of years. I appealed this as completely unfair (if they're going to re-assess people, re-assess EVERYONE equally). They just shrugged, said: "we have the right to do whatever we want" and that was that.
I'd bet Hollywood's wealthy and powerful have little to worry about. No one will take their homes. Yep, they'll just keep going on and on criticizing the rest of us while they sit comfortably in their mansions. :-(
Out manned and outgunned. The People can't revolt!! Not if they want to live. Our Founding Father's never forsaw the technology the government would have today. Nor did they see a day when our founding principles would not be taught to our children....
BTW, New London, Connecticut, is a tiny coastal city of historical significance and substantial poverty. The movie Mystic River gives you a good grasp. Nonetheless, it is the site of the US Submarine Base and has many conservative, Southern, promilitary veterans who stayed when they mustered out of the Navy. This means that the Connecticut left will want to ruin that community lest it ever return to prior voting patterns.
The left in Connecticut has already exterminated the once formidable political clout of mill town, blue collar Democrats who were furious social and military conservatives. You have to understand that, however silly it may sound elsewhere, Lieberman is a conservative officeholder in the context of Connecticut even though he started as a candidate of the New eft in 1970. Now his former honor guard aspires to be his firing squad as Boris Pasternak wrote in Dr. Zhivago.
Wanna bet?
"So, where do we all start?"
You're a well-spoken guy. You start with your neighbors. You start an organization. You write. You speak. You get elected to something.
You start the same way everything in this country starts.
I started writing to legislators years ago regarding eminent domain issues. Locally. Regionally. Statewide. Nobody else seemed interested.
I'll give you the best example I know of grassroots activism. That was California's Proposition 13. Who'd have thought a rollback of assessed valuations on property could ever succeed? Who'd have thought that limits to increases in property taxes could ever succeed? Yet it did.
I know one thing. It isn't going to happen in threads on Free Republic. It's going to take a lot of work, organization, and sheer plodding to do something like this.
Those who are babbling about revolution aren't the ones who get changes made. That much I know for certain.
And you posted this how? Through your aluminum foil cap maybe?
BTW, look through my posts. I haven't mentioned doing anything. You should take up reading. It's quite pleasurable at times.
Reeeeeeelooooooading......
sob
Did someone say "check and balance?" Where are the people's representatives? Where is the people's Commander in Chief? Hello? Hello? ... Is there anybody there? Hello?
Sorry, that was a general use of "you."
Because federal law (the 5th Amend.) `trumps' state law ("WeSaySo") and if the federal government is prohibited under the Fifth Amendment from taking private property unless it is for a public purpose, then so are state and local governments.
But wait, the last sentence in the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights is just---obiter dictum after today!
Further, SCOTUS can open their session with a prayer as well as display the 10 Commandments, but we plebes in the provinces may not.
I suppose you think that the one third of the Colonists that supported the War of Independence had the British Navy and Army out manned and outgunned with superior technology. You betcha!
Actually, I'm a woman. And my neighbors don't care. I'm also un-electable. But your point is well-taken. It must be a grass-roots effort.
"This SCOTUS ruling may have just been the pin to pop the bubble of the runaway real estate markets?
Comments welcome"
BINGO!!!! Are you now willing to go spend even more money on a house that is now just as equally in jeopardy as your existing?
At a minimum this can now be used as a local government's strongarm to wrest more tax $$ outta your wallet.
"Pay this new, much higher property tax, or we'll just let Walmart plop one of those supercenters in your vegetable garden"
Ridiculous! This must not be able to stand!
R3
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