Free Republic

New York’s eminent domain policies rob the vulnerable to reward the powerful.In November, New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld the use of eminent domain to take homes and small businesses to make way for wealthy developer Bruce Ratner’s so-called “Atlantic Yards” development: 16 mammoth skyscrapers centered around a basketball arena. The court accepted the Empire State Development Corporation’s contention that the area was “blighted”—based on a study that Ratner paid for himself and which wasn’t even initiated until years after the project was announced. The court didn’t go so far as to embrace the reasoning of...

How best should we understand the unconstitutional abomination of ObamaCare? Think of it as the Democrats’ eminent domain takeover of your body. Your lungs, kidneys, liver and brain have all been declared property of the state. Nancy Pelosi will grant permission for your heart to beat. Harry Reid will allow your stomach to digest. Barack Obama holds the contract to your spleen. When they take a fancy to your cellular real estate, you’re toast.

A New York appellate court last week harshly rejected the state's effort to take property from businesses in upper Manhattan and give it to Columbia University for its campus expansion, calling it a "scheme" hatched by the university and the state and labeling their arguments in favor of invoking eminent domain, the government power to seize private property, as "mere sophistry." Yet for decades the state has confiscated private property on the slimmest of pretexts, often vastly underpaying, and in the process ruined businesses and lives. The Institute for Justice, an Arlington, Va.-based, public-interest group, recently called New York one...

Hampstead must decide if it will pay $2.89 million for a 10-acre parcel of property that it acquired in an eminent domain trial. The six-member jury came up with the $2.89 million figure Tuesday as just compensation for the property the town wants to take from Oakmont Green, a golf course in Hampstead. The town sought the land because it includes a well. That figure is more than the highest appraisal that was presented in the trial. After the number was announced, Lee Snyder, owner of Oakmont Green Inc., was on the verge of tears. He said he is hoping...

Eminent Domain: Four years after the Supreme Court told a Connecticut homeowner that no one's house is safe from developers, Brooklyn homeowners may lose their homes to a pro basketball team. On June 3, 2005, by a 5-4 margin, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively repealed the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, deciding that your constitutional right to be secure in your home didn't matter if your state or community decided your property could produce more revenue as a shopping mall or condominium development. Pfizer coveted Susette Kelo's working-class neighborhood for an office park and condominium complex. The city fathers...

With Pfizer Leaving, City Has Nothing But Weedy Acres To Show For Grandiose Development Scheme That Uprooted Homeowners And Razed A Neighborhood I'm often asked if I'd consider writing a novel. My answer is always no, truth is better than fiction ... and often harder to swallow. Consider the bitter pill that Pfizer Inc. slipped New London this week. Barely a decade after constructing a $300 million research and development headquarters in the city, the pharmaceutical giant announced it was shutting down the facility. Just like that, New London will lose 1,400 jobs and become home to a gigantic, vacant...

After enduring three years of delays, several lawsuits and the collapse of the real estate market, the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn took a major step forward on Tuesday when New York’s highest court ruled that the state can seize private property for the 22-acre development. The Court of Appeals ruled 6 to 1 that the state could exercise eminent domain in claiming businesses, public property and private homes for economic development projects like Atlantic Yards. In doing so, the court backed the state’s assessment that the area in question — where some holdouts had refused to sell...

Stories like this just make me weep for my country. In September local Connecticut news station WTNH reported: Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation’s most notorious eminent domain project.There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs...

The private homes New London, Conn., took through eminent domain from Suzette Kelo and others, are torn down now, but Pfizer has just announced that it closing up shop at the research facility that led to the condemnation. Leading drugmakers Pfizer and Wyeth have merged, and as a result, are trimming some jobs. That includes axing the 1,400 jobs at their sparkling new research & development facility in New London, and moving some across the river to Groton. To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to...

An American man who made coffee in his own home while nude is facing charges of indecent exposure. Eric Williamson, from Springfield, Virginia, was brewing coffee in his kitchen when a woman and a seven-year-old boy walked past the window and saw him. The woman complained to police who arrested Williamson shortly after the incident on Monday morning. Williamson, 29, insisted he did nothing wrong and that any exposure of his private parts were accidental. "Yes I wasn't wearing any clothes but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I...

Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation's most notorious eminent domain project. But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

The majority upheld that the city of New London, Conn., could declare as urban blight the Kelo house and the well-kept neighborhood it was in so that the city could sell it to a developer who promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues. Four years later? Nothing. The land the city stole [not legally stealing because Ruth Bader Ginsberg told them they could do it] truly is urban blight today, Katie Nelson of the Associated Press reported.

The murderous secular humanist religions of Communism and Nazism were spawned by the anti-God/utopian tradition of Revolutionary France. The Black Book of Communism, an 800- page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, graphically details the terror, torture, man-made famine, mass deportations, starvation, and massacres undertaken on behalf of revolutionary utopian ideals. The reality of Communism, which claimed to be an emissary of the Enlightenment, of universal brotherhood, and of happiness for all as envisioned by Gracchus Babeuf, turned out to be not only a sadistic engine for unimaginable evil but also the creator of hells on earth. The...

Jonestown resident Marlon Coplin lives on the north side of Lake Travis and enjoys his lakefront property. But he is being taken to court by the city of Cedar Park because the city wants eminent domain rights of his property. By September, an intake barge in planned on being built in order to supply water to Cedar Park... "Just the land itself is worth $800,000," said Coplin. "They're offering me $42,000." As it stands now, Coplin feels he's being cheated. "Some day I'd like to sell my property, and now I'm going to have to sell it 50 cents on...

Four years ago, on June 23, 2005, a 6-3 Supreme Court majority ruled in Kelo v. New London that the New London, Connecticut government could condemn houses in that city's Fort Trumbull area in the name of redevelopment. A bit over a year later, the city settled with the area's final two holdouts, the Cristofaro family and Susette Kelo. Since then the city has without success tried to engage a developer to build a hotel on part of the now-leveled area, and to put apartments or condos on the rest. Yes, you read that right; they're building residences where residences...

It is already known that Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has used racist language to describe herself as more qualified than "white males." According to "Vote No on Sotomayor" (Wall Street Journal, July 24 2009, page A13), Sonia Sotomayor also, as a jurist on the Second Circuit, voted to sanction the moral and ethical equivalent of retail theft by price tag switching. This is strong language, but we invite our readers to tell us why it does not accurately describe the quoted material: Judge Sotomayor also revealed a troubling approach to property rights in Didden v. Village of...

Every now and then, even in Oregon, environmental activists and property rights advocates find themselves on the same side of the political fence. One of those politics-makes-strange-bedfellows issues has been brewing in the Oregon Legislature and may still find its way to the governor's desk if Senate strategists can get it to the floor for a vote. House Bill 3058, which passed the House a couple of weeks ago, would allow private companies seeking to construct "linear utility or transportation" facilities to apply for removal and fill permits for wetlands on other people's property. These companies already have the considerable...

How the Sotomayor nomination revived the debate over eminent domain abuse Property rights were probably the last thing on President Barack Obama's mind when he selected Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. But that hasn't stopped Sotomayor's nomination from reigniting the long-simmering national debate over the use and abuse of eminent domain. The controversy centers on Sotomayor's vote in a 2006 eminent domain case, Didden v. Village of Port Chester. New York entrepreneur Bart Didden says Port Chester condemned his land after he refused to pay $800,000 (or grant a 50 percent stake in his...

Employing a rarely used provision of city code, Milwaukee officials are poised to take two commercial lots from one owner and then sell them to another developer who has made campaign contributions to a key alderman. If the land acquisition goes through, it will dash the dreams of Rafael Cetina, whose family bought the land in 2002 with visions of building a restaurant and club that would serve spicy Mayan flavors paying tribute to his heritage on the Yucatan Peninsula. The process of eminent domain is almost never used by the city to acquire commercial real estate. The last time...

http://standourground.org/2009/06/eminent-domain-or-theft-city-of-less-than-3000-people-condemns-235-acres-of-farmland-for-city-use/