NJ Wants To Take Man's House To Promote Atlantic City Tourism

Charlie Birnbaum,68, and his Atlantic City house

[From article]
The home, an aging but well-kept relic of Atlantic City's once-thriving past, is owned by 68-year-old Charlie Birnbaum, who has worked as a piano tuner for local casinos for more than 30 years.
Since 2012, his property has been the target of a state agency that aims to use eminent domain to demolish his three-story property to build a yet-to-be-announced tourism village the state says will revitalize the economically struggling area.[. . .]
In 2011, the New Jersey state Legislature passed a law granting the CRDA to clear and build a space that would support the much-anticipated Revel Hotel and Casino, a towering $2.4 billion structure on the north end of the city's boardwalk that, at the time, represented new hope for the struggling city. The investment didn't pay off.
By 2014, the Revel and three other major Atlantic City casinos shut down. This year, an investor bought up the property for a fraction of the cost, but the casino's future still remains uncertain.
[. . .]
In November, a Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the state, saying that the CRDA had authority to seize the property by paying a fair market price. The judge has still not responded to a motion to reconsider the ruling filed by Birnbaum's attorney, which has allowed him to remain there for the time being.
[. . .]
Birnbaum's parents were Holocaust survivors who met while hiding in the forests of Poland. Both of their prior spouses had been killed by the Nazis. They fled to an American-controlled part of Germany, where Charlie Birnbaum was born in 1947, and eventually made it to the United States.
The family had a talent for music, so they moved to Pennsylvania to study piano, where Birnbaum, a prodigy, played a concerto in the Philadelphia Orchestra at age 11. When their Philadelphia home was condemned, they moved out of the city, a decision Birnbaum said sparked symptoms of depression for his mother. As an undergraduate, he suffered a breakdown that led to a failed suicide attempt.
Seeking greener pastures, the family moved to the home near the beach in Atlantic City.
[. . .]
his mother and a caretaker were beaten to death by a drug addict inside the home.
[. . .]
Birnbaum, who lives with his wife in nearby Hammonton, has relied on the property as the base of his piano-tuning business to house his tools, and for rest between shifts. (CRDA's attorney has pointed to the fact that he doesn't live in the home as partial justification for the eminent domain.) But Birnbaum said that it doesn't matter whether he lives in it or not.
"People all their life are looking for a special place to be. Well, I have it in this place,"

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/chris-christie-eminent-domain-new-jersey/index.html

This man won't let New Jersey take his home
By Chris Moody

CNN Senior Digital Correspondent

Video by Alex Rosen, CNN
Updated 10:21 AM ET, Sat June 13, 2015

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

Institutionalized Government-Enabled Scam to Steal Taxpayer Funds

[From article]
What kind of bondholder or lender would willingly sell his property at 20 percent below market? None in his right mind, without the threat of eminent domain. Predictably, bondholders and lenders—including Wells Fargo Bank—have taken Richmond to court. Last month, lawyers for the city asked a federal court to throw out the lenders’ lawsuits, which allege that the city’s plan violates the constitutional requirement that governments pay just compensation for taken property. Two weeks earlier, Richmond’s mayor and other elected city officials showed up unannounced at Wells Fargo’s headquarters in San Francisco demanding that the bank drop its complaint. A security guard turned them away.

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/cjc0912sg.html

STEVEN GREENHUT
Eminent Scam
A plan to rescue some Californians from possible foreclosure sets a dangerous precedent.
12 September 2013

Columbia University Exploits Eminent Domain

[From article]
"The fat cats don't need the protection of property rights, because they already control the political system. It's the little guy (or gal), the one without political juice, who needs strong property rights for protection from the fat cats and the politicians they control.
[. . .]
the more power you give to politicians and their cronies, the less incentive people have to try to succeed through hard work. What's the point, if you're at the mercy of the cronies?
[. . .]
The courts are supposed to be there to protect the rest: The people without the connections, the ones who depend on the rule of law to keep the predators away."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/columbia_vs_the_little_guy_1Kx7nuGlUH2Pzvc4mwGvhK

Columbia U. vs. the little guy
By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
New York Post
Last Updated: 1:45 AM, December 17, 2010
Posted: 10:18 PM, December 16, 2010

Blight is in the Eyes of the Beholder

Blight is in the Eyes of the Beholder

Jane Jacobs' explained blight in her book "The Death an Life of Great
American Cities." Government officials and professional planners declare
diverse,
thriving, exciting and safe neighborhoods blighted. Bankers refuse to grant
loans to residents of those neighborhoods.
If they are allowed to survive the "blighted" neighborhoods can unslum
themselves without outside help. But if the power of eminent domain is applied
to destroy a neighborhood there is no defense. Has Columbia adopted the
practices of Robert Moses?

--
Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA


EVICTIONS MADE (TOO) EASY
By TOM ELLIOTT
New York Post

September 19, 2007 -- TO realize its planned expansion in Manhattanville,
Columbia University will need the power of eminent domain - that is, the ability
to force property owners to sell at a "fair" price, below what they'd otherwise
hold out for. The prospect of such takings has probably caused more resentment
than any other part of the school's plan.

Technically, the power would be exercised by the state-run Empire State
Development Corp. (ESDC) - which must first reach a formal finding that the area
is "blighted."

But the ESDC has subcontracted the study that will make that determination to
the consulting firm of AKRF - which Columbia itself has already hired to help
sell its overall plan to city officials.

This arrangement inspired locals like Nick Sprayregen to sue - demanding the
ESDC produce its communications with AKRF to see if the consulting firm is truly
acting as an independent arbiter.

A judge agreed: "While acting for Columbia, AKRF has an interest of its own in
the outcome of [ESDC's] action, as AKRF, presumably, seeks to succeed in
securing an outcome that its client, Columbia, would favor." But ESDC's appeal
of that ruling won't be heard until December, so everything's going ahead for
now.

Complicating matters is the fact that AKRF, which specializes in
environmental-impact statements, has been the government's go-to consultant for
just about every major development over the last six years.
[...]