More on eminent domain

Some really great discussion in the latest issue of DC Watch, including a link to (as usual) great comments about this topic by Sam Smith--EMINENT DOMAIN MEANS THE EMINENT GET THE DOMAIN--from his weblog Undernews. This entry specifically discusses what happened in Southwest DC.

As someone said in a posting on the pro-urb list...it's scary to end up on the same side as rabidly anti-government folks...as reflected in such examples as this article, "Shocking New Developments In Supreme Court vs. Homeowners CaseNews Media Blackout On 'Revving Bulldozers,' Intimidation And Harassment Of New London Residents," from the website Prison Planet which I would never have likely come across otherwise.

As H Street neighbor and (newly minted lawyer) Rich Luna said on a neighborhood e-list:

The Mayor has statutory authority to condemn property that meets certain statutory requirements. By administrative regulation, he has assigned that authority to ReStore DC for commercial development or Home Again for residential development (both divisions of the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development). Title 16, section 1311 (D.C. Stat. sec. 16-1311 (2004) of the D.C. Code is one section that discusses it.

I began a dialogue with contacts in those offices in the spring to explore the possibility of condemning some the worst empty lots on H (so that we could turn them into community gardens until the city found a better use). The decision in Kelo is likely to make that option a lot more appealing now.

That being said, Kelo v. New London sets a very scary precedent. Oddly enough, it requires citizens to be far more vigilant and demand much greater responsiveness from the political branches. Yet responsivenessis exactly what our political branches are designed to avoid. (Emphasis added.)
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Also, this editorial "When Government Takes Too Much," by Philip Langdon, ran in the Hartford Courant in March. It provides the back story of the New London case, that the projects were really pushed forward by the State of Connecticut more than the local community....

"John Norquist, mayor of Milwaukee for 15 years before becoming president of the Congress for New Urbanism, says that when government has to resort to eminent domain to carry out economic development, often the projects don't make economic sense.

Until I visited what's left of the neighborhood after extensive bulldozing, I had assumed that Pfizer's $270 million research complex would spin off tremendous benefits for nearby sections of the city. Naive me. What I found, on a peninsula down the Thames River from downtown New London, was a 23-acre private compound - 700,000 square feet of buildings plus an ample amount of open space - retreating behind a guarded gatehouse. If you so much as aim a camera toward the complex from a public overlook, as I did, security personnel will come question what you're doing.

There is little chance that the Pfizer complex, with its 1,500 physicians, researchers and other employees, will eventually become part of a lively urban neighborhood. It has been designed as an isolated corporate campus rather than a workplace intimately connected to its neighbors. Perhaps the self-imposed isolation seemed essential to a company involved in competitive, sometimes controversial pharmaceutical research, but it defeated the possibility of breathing new life into an old city. The complex's only major contributions to New London are likely to be tax revenue (which the city certainly needs) and employment (also needed in a city with a 7.6 percent unemployment rate). (...)

Although the NLDC has since cleared much of the 90 acres, the hotel and conference center it promised have yet to be started. Office space in a 90,000-square-foot research and office building left over from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center stands vacant. Construction has yet to begin on upscale housing that was to be suitable for Pfizer employees. Norquist says such disappointing results are common in economic development projects that rely on the threat or use of eminent domain. The "rigorous economic evaluation traditionally carried out by the private sector" is eliminated in many undertakings carried out through eminent domain, Norquist says. The result, he avers, is "many ill-conceived, special-interest projects."