Avaricious Developers & Governments Twist Meaning of "Blight"
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[It isn't often that George Will writes a good column.--DC]
http://tinyurl.com/ychzk4z
Avaricious developers and governments twist the meaning of 'blight'
By George F. Will
Sunday, January 3, 2010; A17
On Aug. 27, 1776, British forces routed George Washington's novice army
in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought in fields and woods where
today the battle of Prospect Heights is being fought. Americans' liberty
is again under assault, but this time by overbearing American governments.
The fight involves an especially egregious example of today's eminent
domain racket. The issue is a form of government theft that the Supreme
Court encouraged with its worst decision of the past decade -- one that
probably will be radically revised in this one.
The Atlantic Yards site, where 10 subway lines and one railway line
converge, is the center of the bustling Prospect Heights neighborhood of
mostly small businesses and middle-class residences. Its energy and
gentrification are reasons why 22 acres of this area -- the World Trade
Center site is only 16 acres -- are coveted by Bruce Ratner, a
politically connected developer collaborating with the avaricious city
and state governments.
To seize the acres for Ratner's use, government must claim that the area
-- which is desirable because it is vibrant -- is "blighted." The
cognitive dissonance would embarrass Ratner and his collaborating
politicians, had their cupidity not extinguished their sense of the absurd.
The condo of Daniel Goldstein, his wife and year-old daughter, which
cost Goldstein $590,000 in 2003, is on part of the land where Ratner's
$4.9 billion project would be built -- with the assistance of more than
$1 billion in corporate welfare from the state and city governments,
which are drowning in red ink. The Goldsteins' building would not seem
blighted to anyone not paid to see blight for the convenience of the
payers. Which is of constitutional significance.
The Constitution says that government may not take private property
other than for a "public use." By "public," the Framers, who did not
scatter adjectives carelessly, meant uses -- roads, bridges, parks,
public buildings -- directly owned or primarily used by the general
public. In 1954, however, in a case concerning a crime- and
infectious-disease-ridden section of Washington, D.C., the court
expanded the notion of "public use" to include removing "blight."
Since then, that term, untethered from serious social dangers, has
become elastic in the service of avarice. In 2005, the court held, 5 to
4, that New London, Conn., could take the property of a middle-class
neighborhood and transfer it to a corporate developer who would pay more
taxes to the city government than the evicted homeowners had paid.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, dissenting, warned that the consequences of
the decision would "not be random." The beneficiaries would be people
"with disproportionate influence and power in the political process."
Enter Ratner, with plans to build a huge complex of high-rise
residences, commercial properties and a basketball arena for the NBA's
New Jersey Nets, which he bought. The city and state governments
salivated at the thought of new revenue -- perhaps chimerical -- to
waste. The problem was, and is, that people live and work where Ratner
wants to build.
So blight had to be discovered. It duly was, by a firm that specializes
in such discoveries. New York's highest court ratified that finding, 6 to 1.
But a week later, Columbia University, which has plans for a $6.3
billion expansion in Manhattan, was stymied in its attempt to wield the
life-shattering power of eminent domain against several local businesses
that do not want to be shattered. A state court held, 3 to 2, that
condemnation proceedings had been unconstitutional. The court said the
blight designation was "mere sophistry": "Even a cursory examination of
the study reveals the idiocy of considering things like unpainted block
walls or loose awning supports as evidence of a blighted neighborhood."
The idiocy was written on Columbia's behalf by the same firm that Empire
State Development Corp. hired to find blight at the Brooklyn site. Both
Columbia and Ratner are operating in partnership with the ESDC, an arm
of the state government. Both Columbia's and Ratner's attempts at
seizing property are "pretextual takings," using trumped-up accusations
of blight to concoct a spurious "public use" for a preconceived project.
The Atlantic Yards nonsense was compounded when Ratner, to bolster his
balance sheet after the real estate collapse, sold the Nets to a Russian
billionaire, who stands to benefit from Ratner's government-subsidized
seizure of other people's property. Those people can only hope that New
York's highest court will grant their appeal for reconsideration on the
grounds that Ratner's argument is about as good as the Nets are. Through
Saturday, their record was 3-30.
--
Dan Clore
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My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"