Suzette Kelo's house
Site of Suzette Kelo's house today
Posted on 05/18/2021 9:07:22 PM PDT by DoodleBob
In the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court allowed the city of New London, Connecticut to take Susette Kelo’s little pink house (also the name of a very good movie about the case) via eminent domain for the “public use” of furthering economic development in the town’s Fort Trumbull neighborhood. The fight in that case was over the meaning of the words “public use” in the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, and whether the words provide essentially any limit on what a municipality or legislature says is “public use.” In Kelo, one of the major beneficiaries of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment plan was Pfizer, which received tax breaks from the city to build in the neighborhood. Pfizer never actually built anything, and in 2009 it closed its New London facilities. The land is still vacant, with some residents using it for gardening. A community center is now planned for the land.
Kelo created an understandable backlash, as 45 states passed some sort of reforms (some toothless) to their eminent‐domain practices in the wake of the decision. But the first backlash came from the four dissenting justices, led by Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote that the consequences of the Court’s decision would be dire:
Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.
Fred Eychaner is not exactly someone with few resources, but he still found his land in the crosshairs of Chicago officials who wanted to give it to a politically connected business. His land in the River West neighborhood was two blocks north of the Blommer Chocolate Company. According to the Eychaner’s petition to the Supreme Court, “to secure Blommer’s support for a zoning change, the City of Chicago condemned Eychaner’s property to give it to Blommer.” Stretching the broad holding of Kelo even further, the city “based the taking on a finding that the area was at risk of future blight.”
Eychaner filed suit in federal court arguing, among other things, that the city’s taking of his property is not for a “public use” as the term was understood in 1791, when the states ratified the Fifth Amendment, or during the subsequent century of judicial interpretation. From the 1790s until the early 20th century, state courts took the lead on takings law and for the most part held the narrow view that “public use” meant ownership by, or access to, the public. Still, a minority of state courts during this period took the broad view that it means anything a legislature determines to be useful to the public.
In the early to mid‐20th century, however, the Court’s takings jurisprudence transformed. In 1954, in Berman v. Parker, Justice William O. Douglas upheld the District of Columbia’s confiscation of non‐blighted property as part of a broader anti‐blight program, declaring that “when the legislature has spoken, the public interest has been declared in terms well nigh conclusive.” Translation: whether something is for a “public use” is to be determined by the legislature, and there are very few legal avenues to challenge the claim that a taking is for the “public use.”
Of course, if a legislature is free to define “public use” without a court’s exacting appraisal of its constitutionality, then, as Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his Kelo dissent, those words become essentially meaningless. This would be contrary to the Court’s longstanding view that all of the Constitution has actionable meaning, and that no words are “hortatory fluff,” as Justice O’Connor put it in her separate Kelo dissent. Berman should have been an outlier, but in 1984, in Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, the Court doubled down on the basic holding. Then, in Kelo, Justice John Paul Stevens, who later called it the “most unpopular opinion that any member of the Court wrote during” his 34‐year tenure, misread precedent to uphold Berman and Midkiff, adding that A‐to‐B transfers are even permissible for the incredible “public use” of “economic development.”
Cato has filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take Eychaner’s case and reconsider Kelo. If a legislature’s definition of “public use” is “well nigh conclusive,” then the justification for a taking need not stop at reversing existing blight or promoting economic development, but may, as Chicago argues here, extend to the apparent danger of “future blight.” This is perilous terrain, and the slippery slope is steep. There are a lot of reasons legislatures might want your property, and if they can claim mere potential blight, then no one’s property is safe. Under Kelo, as long as the taking is not pretextual or completely arbitrary, then an eminent‐domain action that is claimed to be for public use is acceptable, even though it’s just an unconstitutional A‐to‐B transfer. This is anathema to both the spirit and words of the Takings Clause, and counsels overturning Kelo before the misguided Berman and Midkiff precedents become even more dangerous.
IBTRobertsHate.
Agreed. Kelo was a disgrace. Totally irrational ruling.
Kelo was wrong.
Not the first time, won’t be the last.
Obergfell (or whatever it is) is right up there with bad decisions.
I just learned that, in addition to Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito each wrote a separate dissenting opinion in that case, that Roberts read part of his dissenting opinion from the bench, his first time doing so since joining the Court in 2005.
Site of Suzette Kelo's house today
Great movie. Absolutely disgusting decision.
SCOTUS will never overturn Kelo.
One of the court’s worst decisions.
All of them need to b eoverturned.
Night table reading for insomniacs:
Jeff Benedict’s Little Pink House: The Back Story of the Kelo Case
Book Review
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/302394446.pdf
It was Pfizer (the uh... vaccine maker who used a subcontractor, who does little research to this day. Pfizer has acquired and then fired— many major US formerly independent pharma research/marketers: Wyeth, Upjohn,Parke-Davis to name a few) who did all this greasing of New London civic types during Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth which had the New London facility.
A well known local fact is that the Pfizer types who were at their Groton, CT facility (the big money mngmt types) took the ferry over from Long Island— no commutes through NY to CT or need to live over there. In any event,in November 2009, Pfizer announced plans to close the New London facility following the company’s merger with Wyeth. The facility was closed and finally sold in 2011— they never intended to expand in the first place (it was a merger tax/negotiation move). The “redevelopment” land was used for hurricane debris and is now... a dump. Twisting condemnation for their convenience.Not the first time.
Clarence Thomas dissented with this sharp observation and a originalist dissent, saying the Court precedent’s were flawed, having replaced the Fifth Amendment’s public use clause with a “public purpose” test:
“This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a ‘public use.’....”
He was right. Look how much damage these paid off creeps did to their “community”.
To clarify— Pfizer’s R&D HQ is still in Groton, and they still take the ferry (those who live in huge places on Long Island on the LI Sound side, am guessing— not that there’s anything wrong with that. Bernie Madoff late resident of Butner Federal Correctional Unit, had a place on Montauk Point- and wonder if the view was worth what happened to him and his sons/wife).
Should
Overturning KELO would be one of the greatest victories for private property/owning rights. The original case was legally bullshit and involved a corrupt Democrat/business cabal’s plans for making private land into a shopping center (in which some reportedly had interests or were getting bribes to vote for).
they should
an utterly horrible ruling
For the Socialist on the Court, it was a NO BRAINER.
Individuals shouldn’t own property.
Little Pink House The Kelo House, also known as the Little Pink House, was built in 1890 in a residential area of New London by John Bishop, a prominent local carpenter. It had various owners after Carpenter’s death in 1893 and few years later was moved to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London. In the late 1980s, the Little Pink House and the house next to it were restored by the preservationist, Avner Gregory. On the market for many years, the house was not occupied until Susette Kelo moved in in 1997. When the City of New London sought to use the right of eminent domain to acquire the neighborhood for private development (which would bring in more tax money) it started a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2005. Although Kelo lost in Kelo vs. City of New London, the public reaction to the abuse of eminent domain laws led to citizen activism and new reform legislation in favor of property owners. Three years after the decision, in 2008, the house was rededicated on a new site on Franklin Street in New London. The house had been reacquired and moved by Avner Gregory and stands as a monument, with an explanatory plaque out front, to the battle over eminent domain. A new book about the case, Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage, by Jeff Benedict, a great read.
This is what the piece of land that Kelo's house occupied now looks like:
After the houses were destroyed, nothing happened. No R&D complex, no gentrified condos, no influx of high-net-worth PhDs. Nothing.
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