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"Perhaps for domestic investors, but as the poster Vicomte13 astutely pointed out yesterday, this will likely spur at least some international investors to give more consideration to such investments since obviously there is now a large advantage given to investors over small owners of property."

What I wrote applies to domestic investors in real estate as well, so long as they are associated with LARGE development enterprises.

What the US Supreme Court did does indeed make title to land in the United States subject to local political control. Local governments may now shift the ownership of land between private owners in order to secure what is, in the opinion of the local government, the best use of land. Private owners who are expropriated must be paid "fair value", which is generally based upon tax assessment rolls, which are themselves generally rather outdated and do not reflect the true market value of the property. However, since people pay their property taxes based on these assessed values and do not complain that, no, they should be paying more in taxes because their land is worth more, it is difficult to argue that the city has undervalued the property when a taking comes. All of the OTHER reasons to contest the taking have been removed by this decision. Before, cities had to fight legally to justify doing as they did. Now, the burden is on the individual expropriated landowner to prove that the city acted irrationally or unfairly in doing as it did.

This is American federalism at its finest. The decision is pressed down to the very lowest level: a town's planning and zoning board, which is generally composed of appointees who themselves are part of the real estate profession (this is why they seek out these position). The federal government has been eliminated from the process by the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has said that there is no constitutional issue involved here. They have put everything on a rational basis. If the local zoning and planning commission says, in their judgment, that your house is better served as the property of a higher user, then the property is condemned, you are paid based on the assessed value on the assessor's rolls (and have to prove that the assessment is wrong and undervalued: the burden of proof is on the land owner being expropriated, and if he does not prove his case, the town wins), and the higher-use developer obtains the property from the town at a negotiated price, probably higher than what you are paid as the legal "fair value", since this is a different transaction between different parties.

Now, the clear winners in this arrangement are the private investors and developers with the most money. Money in America means strong political connections, especially at the local level where there is generally no outside economic interest and so the largest pool of money that takes an interest dominates. The Supreme Court has eliminated federal oversight or care in this area. It's a local issue, just as the American Founding Fathers envisioned, at least by some arguments.

In such an arrangement, the developer always wins, and in a competition between developers, the high bidder always wins. Clearly, the biggest corporate interests and developers will prevail in such competition, and it is in the interests of capital investors, foreign or domestic, to place their money with the largest development organizations.

Indeed, it is almost biblical. Jesus said that to those who have, more shall be given, while to those who have little, such little as they have shall be taken from them and given to those who have. Of course, Jesus was not referring to US land law.

What this decision did, from my own perspective of dealing in real estate investment with international capital pools, is make the US a more desireable place for large development projects. The biggest fish now have no federal barrier to being able to make large developments more quickly, local officials are always easy to persuade with promises of larger tax revenues and profits and development, and individuals - who always are the problem when they resist, can be more easily swept aside than elsewhere.

Historically, we should remember that England's rise to the economic prominence which resulted in English power that most English and American people are proud of, historically, started out as an agricultural revolution with the Enclosure Acts, whereby the British Crown used its power of eminent domain to sweep away all of the petty yeoman farmers and peasants from the land, enclose it into large estates for the merchant and noble grandees, and thereby make the English agricultural economy much more efficient.
The large pool of disaffected and displaced agriculturals were then available to be transported to America to increase the imperial wealth, or impressed into the Navy or the Army to improve British power vis a vis her continental rivals.

The Supreme Court decision of the US is redolent of the old Enclosure Acts of England, and is quite in the Common Law tradition. It offers an excellent climate for the more-rapid amassing of land by large developers and the elimination of the problem of local resistance by mere small landholders, thereby making investments in American development projects more likely to produce a quicker and favorable return for international and domestic investors who choose the larger investment houses.

Of course it is not so good for the property security of small stakeholders and individual homeowners in areas that are middle or lower class, and their property values may well be negatively affected. But this merely makes such land, if desired, even cheaper for the large developers who might desire it.

The ideal situation, from a commercial developers perspective, is booming values in large commercial development projects and deeply sagging individual residential property values, with ease of removal of single residences and conversion of cheap residential land into higher-margin commercial land or high-end residential land.

It is quite cruel, but the beauty of capitalism, when it is not interfered with by government regulation, is that profits are maximized and idiosyncratic individual desires are not permitted to stand in the way of profitability, because market forces overwhelm them. The Supreme Court of the US just made the US a more desireable place than it was before for the top developers, their investors and professional service people who profit from servicing them.