Free Republic

In the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court allowed the city of New London, Connecticut to take Susette Kelo’s little pink house (also the name of a very good movie about the case) via eminent domain for the “public use” of furthering economic development in the town’s Fort Trumbull neighborhood. The fight in that case was over the meaning of the words “public use” in the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, and whether the words provide essentially any limit on what a municipality or legislature says is “public use.” In Kelo, one of the major...

As of early 2015, almost ten years after the Supreme Court upheld the Kelo condemnations, the properties that were the focus of an epic legal battle remain empty and undeveloped. Several plans to redevelop these lots have fallen through. The only creatures making regular use of them in the intervening years have been a colony of feral cats. These failures were not simply caused by adverse publicity resulting from the public backlash against the Supreme Court ruling or by the recession and financial crisis that began in 2008. As a 2005 New York Times article noted, the failure was a...