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July 11, 2011
The Great Basketball Swindle
A riveting new documentary takes on New York's shameful eminent domain abuse
Reason.com
by Damon W. Root
At its best, Battle for Brooklyn illustrates the scope of these mounting outrages while capturing Goldstein’s shock and anger as he slowly realizes that the deck is truly stacked against him. But since the film clocks in at a lean 93-minutes, several other significant aspects of the story were only briefly addressed or left on the cutting room floor.
One such weakness is Battle for Brooklyn’s treatment of the atrocious November 2009 decision by New York’s Court of Appeals—the state’s highest court—upholding the use of eminent domain. While there is a great scene showing Goldstein anxiously checking his computer for news of the ruling, the only real summary the audience receives is that “we lost.”
Unfortunately, that’s not the half of it. In its 6-1 ruling, the Court of Appeals actually admitted that the state’s blight determination might be bogus and then went ahead and upheld it anyway. “It may be that the bar has now been set too low—that what will now pass as ‘blight,’ as that expression has come to be understood and used by political appointees to public corporations relying upon studies paid for by developers, should not be permitted to constitute a predicate for the invasion of property rights and the razing of homes and businesses,” the majority declared. “But any such limitation upon the sovereign power of eminent domain as it has come to be defined in the urban renewal context is a matter for the Legislature, not the courts.”
NoLandGrab: And — surprise, surprise — New Yorkers are still waiting for our esteemed state legislature to rein in eminent domain abuse. Don't hold your breath.
Posted by eric at July 11, 2011 12:35 PM