Category: property rights

Categories
property rights

Property Grab, Bad

Good news and bad news. The good news is that a New York appellate court has ruled against the plundering of private property.

The court determined that New York State cannot use eminent domain to grab land for Columbia University’s expansion project. According to the ruling, assertions that the neighborhoods to be grabbed are “blighted” are mere sophistry, cooked up to justify a decision that had already been made — hardly a shocking revelation to longtime students of eminent domain abuse.

Property owners in the threatened area are jubilant about the ruling. Nicholas Sprayregen, an owner of self-​storage warehouses who has refused to sell to the university, says he was “always cautiously optimistic.” But he also knew that “we were going against 50 years of unfair cases against property owners.”

Unfortunately, an appeal of the decision will be heard in the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which just ruled six to one that the state was justified in grabbing land to turn over to a Brooklyn developer for the so-​called Atlantic Yards project.

Columbia already owns some 95 percent of the land they wanted for their multi-​billion-​dollar project. As Sprayregen notes, they could easily proceed without the 5 percent owned by the holdouts. But to avoid a little inconvenience, university officials seemed willing to violate the rights and destroy the livelihoods of others.

It’s sad.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights U.S. Constitution

Not Robbed Until Proven Guilty

You are “innocent until proven guilty” in America, with one big exception: Under civil forfeiture laws, police don’t have to prove that a crime has actually been committed in order to seize your property. And once your boat or car is stolen by your government, the burden falls to you to prove your stuff is innocent.

Police departments are getting rich from the loot they seize from folks never convicted of a crime. As the Institute for Justice argues, civil forfeiture laws provide an ugly incentive for police “to enforce the laws in ways designed to maximize forfeiture income rather than to minimize crime.”

Now a challenge has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Alvarez v. Smith concerns six people whose property was seized by Chicago police, though three of them were never charged with a crime. 

The Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute, the ACLU and the Reason Foundation have filed amicus briefs arguing that due process was denied. 

In favor of more free-​wheeling civil forfeiture are a number of state governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and other groups representing government entities that spend the proceeds from the seized loot.

During oral arguments, Judge Sonia Sotomayor asked the pertinent question, “You take the car and then you investigate?”

Backwards justice is no justice at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights property rights too much government

California Crackdowns

A government agency practicing extortion … who’d’a thunk it?

In 1987, the California Coastal Commission lost a Supreme Court case about its attempt to demand beach access from property owners in exchange for building permits. One justice said it was practicing extortion.

Nevertheless, the agency still dictates what land owners must do to receive permits — which are required even to move piles of dirt around. In one instance, the unelected Commission ordered that most of an owner’s land be given over to farming. The Pacific Legal Foundation is fighting this insanity in court.

Richard Oshen decided to produce a documentary about the CCC after friends told him how it was interfering with their own property. The agency had even gone so far as to prohibit them from tape recording its inspection of their land.

Oshen spent years conducting interviews. He even managed to film a conversation with CCC head Peter Douglas in which Douglas downplayed the agency’s dictatorial powers. But Reason magazine reports that Douglas now wants to revoke the permission he gave to use that interview. He’s also demanding to see a pre-​release version of the movie — either to try to prevent its release or just on general principles of harassing critics of tyranny.

I’ve reported on the commission before. It behaves as a kind of environmentalist mafia operating under color of law — and clearly the CCC is no fan of free speech.

Let’s hope that Douglas fails, Oshen succeeds, and California land owners get a reprieve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights responsibility

Downwind in New London

It is at its worst at night, when the wind lets up and the fog is low.

“It” is the stench from the sewage treatment plant in New London, Connecticut.

Citizens have been complaining for some time. It’s not exactly a new problem.

And the whole issue suggests, to me, that the government of New London, which is ultimately responsible for the sewage treatment system, should have been paying closer attention to this basic — most basic, most very, very basic — service. 

It is not as if the city of New London hasn’t spent millions on its sewage system. It’s just that the money has been ineffective. Especially on weekends, or nights, when the smell is worse.

There’s a pattern here. New London condemned Fort Trumbull neighborhood homes to give to the New London Development Corp. The city was sued by one of the owners, Suzette Kelo, and the case went to the Supreme Court. The city won. The homes — including Ms. Kelo’s — were paid for at government-​determined rates, the area razed.

And yet Pfizer has not moved in. The whole area remains flat.

And stinky.

It turns out that Fort Trumbull neighborhood home-​owners had been complaining about the stench before the whole Kelo cased blew up.

We’ve been saying there’s something rotten in New London for a long time. We just didn’t know how literally correct we were.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Shilling For Billionaires

Ever since the Supreme Court endorsed radically expanded use of eminent domain, in 2005’s Kelo v. New London, we have witnessed pitched battles between governments eager to trample property rights and citizens fighting to protect those rights.

Among recent efforts is a Missouri initiative to reform the eminent domain process, led by Ron Calzone with Missourians for Property Rights.

Alas, it’s all too easy to ignore the suffering of human beings whose property rights are violated by “legal” means when you neither see these human beings nor hear their stories. This is why critics of flipping property from the hands of rightful owners to the claws of rapacious opportunists with political pull must be grateful to the producers of Begging for Billionaires: The Attack on Property Rights in America.

The film exposes how city governments “brazenly seize property after property from the powerless” to turn over to well-​connected players “for the pettiest of non-​essential ‘economic development’ projects,” many subsidized by taxpayers. Neighborhoods flattened, lives uprooted. 

Among other stories, we learn that of James Roos, property owner of an area called “blighted” who created a controversial mural to oppose eminent domain abuse.

Friends of liberty and property can defeat the enemies of these rights. Begging for Billionaires dramatizes why we must do so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
property rights

Justice in St. Paul

Imagine being on the edge of your seat for some 20 years. It’s a long time to wait for anything, especially about whether you can keep doing business on your own property.

That’s what Karen Haug and her company, Advance Shoring, have endured since the early ’90s. That was when the port authority of St. Paul, Minnesota announced plans to grab the company’s property for somebody else’s private use. 

Advance Shoring, founded by Haug’s father in 1960, has been fighting the grab ever since.

The port authority has now officially abandoned its plan, agreeing to seek to acquire the property only by voluntary means. Haug says: “I’m breathing a sigh of relief for our business and employees.… Now we can return to running our business.”

As so often in battles to protect innocent Americans against eminent domain abuse, some credit must go to the Institute for Justice. In publicly heralding the port authority’s decision, Lee McGrath, of IJ’s Minnesota chapter, urged city officials to recognize that “the port authority’s past uses of eminent domain are now illegal under Minnesota’s 2006 reforms,” and to strip the port authority of its power to condemn properties.

The port authority, for its part, seems annoyed that there’s been publicity about its defeat. They say they’d been hoping to keep the matter quiet. 

Poor fellows. I weep for them; crocodiles have such tears.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.