Eminent Domain - Don’t Think It Can’t Happen to You!
If you’ve never heard of Kelo v. City of New London, you had better wake up and take notice. This is, in my opinion, one of the most important issues going on in America today. Yet it gets very little mainstream press coverage. This was a landmark Supreme Court case that has forever changed how we can view private property rights.
You work your whole life. You scrimp. You save. You pay off the debt on your little piece of the American Dream - your home. The home you came to with your new bride to start a new life. The home you raised your kids in. The home you call your home. The home you think you’ll grow old in, right? WRONG!
According to Kelo v City of New London, you have no right to your property if the government sees a better “public” use for it. You can read that to mean, if they can pay you “market value”, bulldoze it, and let a private developer build a higher tax yielding property on it, then you would be correct. Appearently, a government by the people and for the people can take away your home if they think they can make more money on it in some other way.
This is not some out of the way case. This is happening in mainstream America. Don’t think it can’t happen to you? Check out the Saleets of Lakewood, Ohio, or this private school in Georgia.
The Kelo v. New London case has given strength to this travesty. Those of you who lean to the left and don’t want more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, well, you might want to take a look at where the left will take you. Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer voted in concurrence. The dissenters were Justices O¯¿½Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.
Over the time that I have attempted to research and write this post, new eminent domain abuses have popped up all over the place. Here is a new one I just found today. Florida’s Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown plans to use eminent domain to revitalize his community’s economy by bulldozing a 400 acre area containing over 2000 homes to make way for the creation of a basin for megayachts with high-end housing, retail and office space, a multilevel garage for boats, a 96,000-square-foot aquarium and a manmade lagoon.
Mr. Brown’s city planning logic is warped. In his own words, “If we don’t use this power, cities will die.” By considering use of eminent domain to revitalize his community as his solemn duty, he is not revitalizing his community (if you define community as the people that live there, not just the land). He is removing his community to replace it with a new one. Since most of the population of Riviera Beach is poor and has a median income of less than $19,000 a year, I doubt they will be excited about the prospect of a new yacht basin where they can park their megayachts. In fact, I doubt any of them will ever be able to return to the area.
The problem here is that Mr. Brown has forgotten that he is a public servant, elected to serve his constituents. His plan will remove the people who voted for him from his constituency and simply replace them with new voters. How unAmerican is that? In the earlier days of this country, shennanigans like that would result in the official being “run out of town on a rail” or worse, tarred and feathered.
The solution to Riviera Beach, Florida’s and New London, Connecticut’s poverty is not displacing it to somewhere else and simply replacing it with a new, upper income bracket. The sad thing is that these mayors will get away with totalitarian socialism, claim great victory over fighting poverty and creating jobs, when in actuality all they have done is stolen from society’s downtrodden and displaced the poor to somewhere else (where it becomes some other mayor’s problem). It is a sad day in America when this is considered successful city planning and appropriate use of eminent domain.
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