Eminent domain? Fine. Building roads, schools, and infrastructure? Acceptable.
Taking other people’s homes to build office complexes? What are we thinking?!
A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth often is at war with individual property rights.
The 5-4 ruling – assailed by dissenting Justice Sanday Day O’Connor as handing ‘disproportionate influence and power’ to the well-heeled in America – was a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They had argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.
As a result, cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.
Office complexes folks. This means that if a developer wants to buy your land and build whatever they so choose, so long as it is in the “best interests of the community” deemed by the local governing authority, the locality can exercise eminent domain.
I hope this doesn’t splash back on developers. In this instance, it’s the unscrupulous ones demanding government step in that are the bad guys. The bad guy here is the Connecticut lawmakers willing to cave in and take this all the way to the Supreme Court.
This is tyrranical folks. I don’t like where this is going one single bit.