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October 31, 2005
They’re Taking Away Your Property for What?
The Court’s eminent-domain ruling is useless as well as unjust.
City Journal
Nicole Gelinas
A scathing article on the history of using eminent domain as a tool for centralized urban planning, with a big focus on the eminent domain-addicted Bruce Ratner:
As planners recognized that they couldn’t solve the problem of housing (and uplifting) the poor, and certainly couldn’t remake entire cities, they scaled back, rather than relinquished, their ambitions. By the seventies and eighties, cities focused on using eminent domain to build sterile business districts and industrial centers to trap disappearing well-paying jobs in inner cities, or to build convention centers, stadiums, and subsidized hotels to lure free-spending out-of-towners. Eminent domain for urban renewal morphed into eminent domain for economic development—with similarly dismal results.
Posted by lumi at October 31, 2005 6:30 AM