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April 16, 2006
Residents at great disadvantage in eminent domain
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Your voice: Kurt J. Meier
A Fort Thomas, KY land-rights attorney explains how governments and developers establish blight:
It is common practice, assert landowners, for cities to target older neighborhoods, albeit with high owner occupancy, and create problems within a targeted neighborhood as an excuse to condemn by a blight standard.
Prove it, you say. One method is to allow private investors, usually with close political ties to City Hall, to go into a neighborhood and buy a significant number of cheap houses and board them up. When this occurs, the city does not enforce building codes and does not require teardowns. Coupled with the city's failure to maintain infrastructures, such as sewers, streets and sidewalks, the city then declares the neighborhood "blighted." It then hires a consultant to undertake an expensive study to underpin the designation of "blight.
NoLandGrab: The tactics described above are reminiscent of how Forest City Ratner cites garbage and storage on the railyards, which is State property, as evidence that the neighborhood is blighted (see online slideshow).
Posted by lumi at April 16, 2006 8:34 AM