The aftermath of the Kelo decision is a an excellent time to renew my call for Wal-Mart to quit using eminent domain to obtain store locations.
It's wrong; it violates the very essence of a market economy, and it does your image no good to use the force of law to evict people from their homes and businesses.
Let me be clear. A Wal-Mart store is NOT a "public use" of land, even if the store does (in the eyes of its owners, employees, and shoppers) serve a public purpose. Wal-Mart should cease and desist from this practice...
I could be taking this too far, but I'd argue that in fact, Kelo means two things for readers of this blog:
1) A city council controlled by Wal-Mart and developer interests will have an easier time of taking private property to put in new big-boxes and strip malls.
2) A city council controlled by anti-sprawl activists and anti-boxboxers will have greater power to shut down megastores if they're considered by the council to be against the best development interests of the area.
Eminent domain as tool just got easier to justify. In other words your private real property is really on loan to you by the city council. You do not have the final say to how it is used; at one time, as long as you agree on a remedy to the harms your uses and your neighbors uses presented to one another, nobody else had any say except for very limited takings.
Now a city council can tell you (by calling in a crank economic "expert" with his predetermined "economic impact report") that the local grocer will "make people better off" by "keeping money in town", and Wal-Mart and Wegmans and other stores can be forced to sell their land and buildings. Or the city council can call in a different "expert" who opposes big-boxes, insisting that they destroy neighborhoods, and should be gutted in order to create a new urban landscape.
This is not a good outcome for anybody, really, except local politicians who can now bid up their demands for political support.
Pathetic.
Posted by Kevin on June, 24 2005 at 11:48 AM
JR wrote:I'm with you on this Kevin. It is not often that I end up agreeing with Clarence Thomas, but from what I read of this decision in the NYT it seems like the most disturbing case the Court has decided in many years. And as an historian and a member of the Nation Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes me fear for the future of the past.
JR
-- June 24, 2005 12:37 PM ∞
Kevin Brancato wrote:What many people don't seem to realize is that Eminent Domain can be used by anti-WM activists too. ED is not just "pro-development"; it's "pro-whatever-the-hell-the-city-council-says", which should send a chill down the spine of anyone suspicious of centralized power.
-- June 24, 2005 12:46 PM ∞
Matt Lipsky wrote:Kevin,
Though I'd argue that the interests of large developers (including those that develop Wal-Marts and other big boxes) are much more likely be served vis-a-vis this ruling than those of anti-WM activists your overall post is dead on.
Matt
-- June 24, 2005 03:09 PM ∞
Kevin Brancato wrote:Matt,
I also think it will be pretty hard to use ED in this way. I don't see how this is useful at all to small businesses in NYC, but some other cases are more plausible...
For example, I think its now possible for activists in Vermont to get political mileage out of continually asserting that Wal-Mart destroys a way of life.
If as the National Trust for Historic Preservation asserts, Wal-Mart truly endagers a unique and desirable pattern of economic development... and their allies can stack their negative evidence higher than their opponents can stack the positive evidence... then it's possible for them to use ED with a compliant city council.
Not easy, granted, but you see where I'm going...
-- June 24, 2005 03:41 PM ∞
Steve Lee wrote:Thankyou for your very informative and thought provoking(!) Website.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority in Kelo "Promoting economic development is a traditional and long-accepted government function, and there is no principled way of distinguishing it from other public purposes the court has recognized."
Freemarketeers might disagree with this but it is now the unwritten law of the land.
California and Florida are now actively in the Bio-Tech business, in Kelo the issue was the property around the new new Phizer pharmaceutical facility.
In local elections that I have studied "Slow-Growth" and "No Development" candidates that run on slates for city councils generally lose; the local polyscibase seems to vote for improved economic growth verses "keeping the area the way it has always been."-- June 25, 2005 02:01 PM ∞
Alan K. Henderson wrote:If the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment were properly followed, one of two things woudl be true:
1. Eminent domain cannot be used to force one private party to sell land to another.
2. Eminent domain can be used to force less affluent parties to sell their property to more affluent ones, or vice versa. I want to see some homeowner use eminent domain to force a mall to sell part of its parking lot.
-- June 28, 2005 01:27 AM ∞
