Lasting Negative Effects of Kelo, Property Taking By Government

[From article]
The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling that the city of New London and a nonprofit quasi-public entity that the city had set up, then called the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), were entitled to seize, in a process known as eminent domain, the homes and businesses of Kelo, the Cristofaros, and five other nearby property owners in the name of “economic development” that would generate “new jobs and increased revenue,” in the words of since-retired Justice John Paul Stevens, author of the majority opinion.
[. . .]
The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment bars governments from taking private property unless the taking is for a “public use.” Historically “public use,” as courts had interpreted it, meant a road, a bridge, a public school, or some other government structure. But in the Kelo decision, the High Court majority declared that “economic development” that would involve using eminent domain to transfer the property of one private owner to a different but more economically ambitious private owner — such as a hotel — qualified as a public use just as much as, say, a new city library.
[. . .]
After Kelo, more than 40 state legislatures passed laws that banned or restricted the use of eminent domain for the purpose of economic rejuvenation, especially when it meant displacing homeowners. At least seven states amended their constitutions to ban the use of eminent domain for economic development, and some state courts explicitly rejected the Kelo ruling as precedent for interpreting those states’ own taking laws.
[. . .]
The Berman and Kelo rulings affirmed a particular kind of liberal vision: that large-scale and intricate government plans trump individuals’ property rights. The Berman case involved a thriving department store in Southwest that could not in any way have been said to be a slum property and whose owners wanted it to stay where it was — just as Susette Kelo and the Cristofaros wanted to stay where they were.
[. . .]
In a footnote to his majority opinion in Kelo, Justice Stevens rejected this contention, reiterating that the “development plan was not intended to serve the interests of Pfizer, Inc., or any other private entity, but rather to revitalize the local economy by creating temporary and permanent jobs, encouraging spin-off economic activities and maximizing public access to the waterfront.” Still, it couldn’t help but be noticed that a Pfizer executive, George Milne Jr., head of the company’s research operations, was a board member of the NLDC. Or that David Burnett, husband of the NLDC’s chairman, Claire Gaudiani, then the president of Connecticut College, one of New London’s three institutions of higher learning, worked under Milne at Pfizer. In a 2001 interview with the Hartford Courant that he undoubtedly later regretted, Burnett said, “Pfizer wants a nice place to operate. We don’t want to be surrounded by tenements.”
[. . .]
The NLDC might have won its case in the courts of law, but it did everything to lose it in the court of public opinion, its critics alleged: having real estate agents harass elderly Fort Trumbull owners on the telephone; showing up on their front porches waving contracts as they were sitting down to their Italian Sunday lunches; in the case of Billy Von Winkle, locking the tenants out of a Fort Trumbull apartment house he owned; trying to extract “rent” from those who resisted on the theory that the NLDC already had title to their properties; and immediately bulldozing the homes of everyone who sold, so as to isolate the seven holdouts psychologically and physically.
[. . .]
Susette Kelo and the Cristofaros, who held out the longest, got nearly half a million dollars apiece. Kelo was allowed to have her pink house disassembled and then reassembled on a lot in downtown New London as a monument to her struggle. She moved to Groton. The Cristofaro house was bulldozed in 2007, but New London, at Michael Cristofaro’s insistence, placed a plaque on a bluff overlooking the Thames in memory of his mother, Margherita, who had died in 2003, while the lawsuit was pending (Pasquale Cristofaro died in 2009). Michael Cristofaro, who had lived in New London all his life, moved to Waterford.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/kelo-revisited_776021.html

‘Kelo’ Revisited
Properties were seized and a neighborhood razed in the name of ‘economic development’ that never came
FEB 10, 2014, VOL. 19, NO. 21
BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN