“As of the beginning of 2010, the original Kelo property was a vacant lot, generating no tax revenue for the city.”
I remember being horrified by this decision. The one liberty essential to the American idea is property rights. Prior to America any king could take your property. My understanding of eminent domain was, until this decision, was that if the government needed a harbor or a train station they could take your property and compensate you for the value. But in the 1960’s LBJ’s Great Society seized black owned property (judged to be of little value) all over Tampa and built Soviet style apartment blocks that they rented (and subsidized the rent) to the former owners of that property. Today, if it weren’t for the government ghetto those privately owned homes would be worth a fortune.
Not only Tampa; the government gutted the urban areas of almost every major city in America. And, you're absolutely correct; most of those homes they bulldozed belonged to blacks. In Boston, "urban renewal" (don't you just love government euphemisms!) for the construction of I-95 (which never happened), resulted in the detraction of thousands of homes in the South End, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods. Today, in the remaining section of the South End, brick townhouses sell for several million dollars.
Property rights ?
Try mining the coal on your land without federal approval.
“I remember being horrified by this decision. The one liberty essential to the American idea is property rights. Prior to America any king could take your property.”
In the 1960s the government seized the properties of the residents of Doodletown NY (along the Hudson River, south of West Point), allegedly to build a ski center for the adjoining Bear Mountain State Park. The ski center was never built, and their properties were simply added to the park (with no improvements - just the demolition of their homes, school, and church, and the barricading of the roads). Some of those families had been there when we DID have a king (they pre-dated the American Revolution); in the end a diffferent “king” took their land anyway...