Susette Kelo bought a 110-year-old Victorian cottage overlooking the Thames River and researched 19 th century building styles to find a historically-appropriate paint color she settled on Odessa Rose, a shade of pink. Matt Dery, a lifelong resident of Fort Trumbull, described to me how he had bought the house next to his parents' home, gutted it to the studs, and renovated it by hand, working on it every day for a year before getting married and moving into it with his bride. On the other hand, many of Fort Trumbull's families were conscientious about their properties, into which many had invested much sweat equity - stripping and refinishing hardwood floors, putting in flowerbeds, installing new plumbing, replacing broken sidewalks.
The Revolutionary-era fort that gave the neighborhood its name was neglected and overrun with weeds. Home to an ill-smelling sewage plant, separated from the rest of New London by railroad tracks, Fort Trumbull was nobody's idea of chic. To be sure, it was no Greenwich, either, as I discovered in 2001, when I visited New London to learn more about the eminent-domain litigation that was just then getting underway. Property owners could be forced to yield to a government seeking to clean up a dirty, dangerous, impoverished slum.īut Fort Trumbull - the New London, Conn., neighborhood at the heart of the litigation in Kelo - was no slum. The Public Use Clause encompassed "public purpose," Berman held - and eliminating the harm caused by blight was a legitimate public purpose. Parker, the Supreme Court had unanimously permitted eminent domain to be deployed for what was then called "urban renewal." It upheld property takings within a blighted area of Washington, DC, where two-thirds of the housing was beyond repair the property was then sold to new owners for redevelopment. "Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."Įven before Kelo, the use of eminent domain had expanded beyond the classic case in which private property is taken to make way for a highway or post office or other public facility. "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property," warned the dissenters in a passage that was widely quoted and struck a chord with the public. O'Connor's dissent, in which Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined, put the bottom line starkly: Kelo meant that property owners could be stripped of their land whenever the government decided that some other owner - some wealthier owner - could use it to make more money or generate more business. If it takes no more than that to satisfy the Constitution's command that only land required "for public use" may be condemned, "then the words 'for public use' do not realistically exclude any takings, and thus do not exert any constraint on the eminent domain power." After all, she observed, practically any lawful use of private property will generate some incidental public benefit. "here is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose."īut as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor pointed out in a vigorous dissent, the Supreme Court had never held that economic development alone could justify the use of eminent domain. "Promoting economic development is a traditional and long-accepted function of government," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens, in a rather bloodless majority opinion joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Anthony Kennedy.
Property could be confiscated for entirely private use, the court ruled, so long as the government expected some eventual public benefit, such as an expanded tax base or new jobs. In so doing, the majority decided that the words "public use" in the Fifth Amendment - "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation" - did not mean what they said. City of New London that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses through eminent domain in order to make the land available to new owners for redevelopment. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court ruled in Kelo v. On June 23, 2005, the US Supreme Court handed down one of the most reviled decisions in its history.
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