how do you feel about this?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0506240150jun24,1,7295148.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

I think it is atrocious.

By Dawnk777 on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 12:51 pm:

Eminent Domain Story

By Dawnk777 on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 12:54 pm:

I agree. I can't believe that they could come and just seize your house, and make you move! Sheesh! Like their business venture is more important than your life!

By Colette on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 12:57 pm:

thanks for posting the clickable link Dawn!

By Emily7 on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 02:46 pm:

That is so wrong!

By Ginny~moderator on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 07:17 pm:

I have mixed feelings. This is an issue I have been following for several months, as we get a lot of legal journals in our office (of course).

If I had to guess - and I am just guessing - the Court handled two eminent domain/"taking" cases this session. One was in California, I believe San Francisco, where a residential hotel wanted to covert to a tourist hotel. The law in that city is that if you convert a large residential building to something other than residential, you have to either build a new residential building with the same number of units or pay a special fee into a city fund. This is because the city has experienced a serious reduction in rental units, making it very difficult for low and moderate income people to find rental housing. The Court ruled that the hotel had to obey the local rules.

The other case is the one posted above. And, there was a similar, long running case in this section of Pennsylvania where a municipality wanted to condemn a farm in order to build a golf course (the farm owner eventually settled, selling a part of the farm to the municipality for what is reasonably close to a fair price). I am guessing that a couple of things were going through the Supreme's minds - that they should be consistent and if they upheld what is called a "taking" in one case, they should uphold "taking" in the other case. And, this Court has, more and more, been ruling in favor of "states' rights", upholding state and local laws.

Finally, there have been a number of rulings by ths Court that have affected property rights in a number of ways - one area that comes to mind is upholding New Jersey laws about development in wetlands and the Pine Barrens areas, which bar property owners from selling property for development in those areas designated as environmentally fragile. Again, it is a matter of the Court wanting to be consistent. If they had ruled in favor of the property owners, they would probably have seen a deluge of new cases based on questions of eminent domain and "taking" - there is a well-funded organization (funded by real estate developers, among others) that is vigorously battling any state or local regulations around development, calling such regulations a "taking". If the Court had ruled in favor of these individual property owners (and I agree, they are getting a raw deal), it would have opened the floodgates for new cases around the same general principal. The legal theory on which these developers are operating is that any state or local regulation which interferes with their making the most profitable use of their property or property they want to buy - no matter what the use - is a "taking", and that states and local governments have no "constitutional" right to interfere with their "right" to make the highest possible profit, even if it means overbuilding, building on wetlands, tearing down property which housed low and moderate income families in order to build McMansions, etc.

Please understand - I think these homeowners got a very raw deal. Tearing down moderate income family homes in order to sell property to a developer to build a highly profitable office center, under the rubric of it being a public development because it will improve the area's tax base, is, I think, an abdication by the local government of their responsibilities toward their citizens. As I understand it, what the local municipality is offering them is nowhere near what it would cost them to find comparable housing in a nearby community, totally aside from the issue of being forced to leave what are,for some of them, their lifelong homes. I just want to pass on some opinions I have read and some guesses about what may have been in the minds of the members of the Court.

By Amecmom on Monday, June 27, 2005 - 07:13 pm:

This is terrible. My mother was forced to sell her childhood home in Brooklyn because they wanted to build a post office. At least they paid full market value, plus credit for appliances and such.
This is nothing like that.
Ame

By Alonewith2 on Friday, July 1, 2005 - 09:10 pm:

A few months ago I read an article from Chicago about the city towing vehicles parked on the sides of the streets. I can't remember the exact story, but the vehicles weren't in 'no parking zones' nor were they 'expired tags', but the city was towing them and selling them for chump change in order to 'pay for citations' or some crap like that. I will try to find the article again, or if someone remembers this story and knows more information, it was around April this year. It doesn't seem worth living in a city if you have to be afraid of your car or house getting taken without notice.