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October 13, 2009
Private Developers Have No Right to My Home
It's time for New York's high court to protect homeowners.
Reason.com
by Daniel Goldstein
Over six years ago Bruce Ratner—a top political contributor and law school friend of then Gov. George Pataki—asked Pataki to use eminent domain to seize 22 acres of prime Brooklyn real estate and hand them over for his Atlantic Yards development plan. By way of comparison, the Ground Zero site is 16 acres. The taxpayer-subsidized project would be 16 skyscrapers and a professional basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets team Ratner bought as leverage for the land grab (and just conditionally sold to Russia's richest oligarch, Mikhail Prokhorov).
These 22 acres happened to include my home and my neighbors' homes and businesses—a slice of an ethnically, racially, and economically diverse, mixed-use neighborhood undergoing steady, healthy growth.
On October 14th our landmark case challenging this abuse of eminent domain to enrich and enormously benefit a powerful and politically connected developer will be argued at the Court of Appeals—New York's high court. The oral argument and eventual ruling will be historic.
"Public use,” required for eminent domain, has come to mean something other than construction of roads, parks, hospitals, schools, railways, etc. It has transmogrified into some amorphous, highly speculative "public benefit" or "public purpose," which could be anything a developer with government "partners" declares it to be.
...New York's legislature is one of the seven that has not acted. Though they did put on an act. Hearings were held in both houses. But proposals for legislation never made it out of committee and after the immediate national post-Kelo uproar subsided, the legislature moved on to its regular, and notable, dysfunction.
So everyday New Yorkers have been left unprotected and undefended by our elected officials. With such a non-responsive legislature, the only place to turn has been the courts, the great equalizer. Thankfully, we have this showdown with the state's most powerful and abusive condemning authority—the Empire State Development Corporation.
New York's Constitution says that property can be taken for a "public use." Not a "public benefit" or "public purpose." No New York State Constitutional Convention or legislature has ever seen fit to change this language or amend it. "Public use" means "public use." But again and again New York has approved eminent domain condemnation for projects, such as Atlantic Yards, that benefit private entities at the public's expense—so not only are they not for "public use," they are not even for the "public benefit." It's time for this to stop.
Posted by eric at October 13, 2009 3:21 PM