Hidden Stadium Costs
Joel Achenbach reports on the neighborhood small businesses that expect to be uprooted to build a home for DC's new baseball team. What's good news for baseball fans is not such good news for property owners. (There's even a play about the most infamous case of stadium-related takings.)
Meanwhile, closer to home, voters in Arlington (Texas, that is) will decide tomorrow whether to build the Cowboys a new palace. That stadium, too, would require seizing lots of local property. And, reports the DMN, some property owners are wondering if such seizures are legal--or will remain so for long.
Owners of homes or small businesses in Arlington may question whether it's legal for a city to take their property so that a large business such as the Dallas Cowboys can use it.
Attorneys and property owners fighting in eminent domain cases across the country are essentially asking the same thing: They are attacking the very idea that eminent domain can be used to sweep aside property that is not blighted in the name of economic development.
The power of a government to condemn private property used to be limited to taking property for a public use, such as a road, park or school.
Critics point to a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Berman vs. Parker, which ruled that a blighted area in Washington, D.C., could be condemned so a private developer could remake it, as expanding eminent domain beyond the founding fathers' intent. By 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Detroit could take hundreds of homes and businesses in the Poletown neighborhood to make way for a General Motors plant.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court will revisit the issue in a case that could revise its 50-year-old ruling.
The Connecticut Supreme Court recently ruled that the city of New London could condemn a nonblighted neighborhood so a builder could put in more upscale developments. Attorneys for the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking two interlocking questions: Can a city take land from one set of private owners to give it to another private owner? And can it do so when the "public purpose," essentially, is to generate more tax revenue for the city?
In Arlington, for example, there are some properties southwest of Ameriquest Field that city officials have described as "blighted." But some of the structures are merely modest working-class homes or older apartment complexes – buildings perhaps more like those in New London than like blight in Washington, D.C.
For more on the New London case, see the Institute for Justice site here. And, if you're looking for end-of-the-year contributions, IJ is a worthy cause.