Economic hype clouds judgment (the Freeport attack on the seafood companies' properties)

IN the late 1980s, an elderly blind widow in Arlington frustrated the city's plans for a grand shopping mall.

She refused to surrender the small plot of land where she had lived for decades, choosing to live out her days in the familiar surroundings of her wood-frame house.

The mall was built around her property, her faded white home jutting into its parking lot.

She held out for years. After she died, developers bought the property and paved it over, melding it into the glaring sameness of suburban retail like the last reluctant piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

In light of last week's Supreme Court decision, a similar battle today would end differently. Developers, with the city's help, could simply put the old widow in the street and level her home in the name of better shopping.

Some cities have, of course, used the municipal powers to seize land, known as eminent domain, to combat urban blight by replacing rundown or abandoned buildings in crime-ridden areas with new development such as ball parks and condos.

Just hours after the Supreme Court's decision Thursday, Freeport officials began efforts to seize waterfront property from two seafood companies as part of an $8 million marina development, according to a report by Chronicle correspondent Thayer Evans.

The action was accompanied by the usual economic development blather. The marina will lure $60 million worth of hotels, restaurants and shops, create hundreds of jobs and revitalize downtown.

"It's all dependent on the marina," Lee Cameron, the city's economic development director, told the Chronicle. "Without the marina, (the hotels) aren't interested. With the marina, (the hotels) think it's a home run."

Therein lies the flawed logic that too often creeps into economic development programs: Success is assumed. Build the marina and the hotels will be a "home run."

It ignores questions developers don't ask, but cities should. What if they strike out? What if, even with a marina, no one stays at the hotels? How long will the hotels stay in business if occupancy rates trail their forecasts?

Is a shuttered hotel development preferable to a waterfront of small, if aesthetically unappealing, businesses?

I'm not predicting failure for the Freeport development. But developers by their nature are optimistic. Every project will succeed until it doesn't.

The 5-4 split in the Supreme Court's decision focused on what constitutes "public use" in the Bill of Rights. The court's majority opinion argues that the economic hype, in the end, justifies the means. Higher taxes from development will benefit all.

It ignores the other component in such deals. Taxes too often are waived, abated or offset with grants and loan guarantees.

The court, in essence, asks us to trust the government, to rest assured that local officials know what's best in pitting other private interests against our own.

In her dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the ruling has such a broad definition of public use that "the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing ... any home with a shopping mall, any farm with a factory."

It's not the same thing as condemning land for roads or parks or public buildings owned and managed for the public benefit.

In the case that sparked the ruling, the city of New London, Conn., wants to raze a working-class neighborhood and replace it with office space, a hotel, condos and a "riverwalk."

Growth by condemnation is becoming popular. A developer in Columbus, Ohio, recently asked the city to condemn 200 private homes so she could build a shopping mall, according to The Columbus Dispatch. She withdrew the request last month.

Michigan has used eminent domain to acquire land for casinos, stadiums, private housing and auto plants, according to the Detroit News.

In Texas, Rep. Frank Corte Jr. of San Antonio already is calling for a state constitutional amendment that would put restrictions on the use of eminent domain.

It's a strange day in America when we rely on state laws to clarify the U.S. Constitution. Yet that's all that stands between our little white houses and the parking lot.

From the link on tag line:

Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.
- John Adams

Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?
- George Washington

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one's silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender - the recognition of his right to one's property. What value or concession did the burglar offer in return? and once the principle of unilateral concessions is accepted as the base of a relationship by both parties, it is only a matter of time before the burglar would seize the rest...
- Ayn Rand

No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
- Mark Twain

When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot easily be cured of it.
- The New York Times, in a 1909 editorial opposing the very first income tax

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
- William Pitt, the Elder (speech to the British Parliament describing a basic American principle [every man a king] that would become ingrained in our Constitution)

Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Where once government was a necessary evil because it protected private property, now private property is a necessary evil because it funds government programs.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of "economic rights," the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new "rights" imposed obligations, not limits, on the state. It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

The right to express one’s individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Government acts as a giant siphon, extracting wealth, creating privilege and power, and redistributing it.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

And most significantly, if we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a Kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government.
- CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

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