While I am by no means a Winchester-waving “git off m’ land, ya dang varmint!” type-of-guy (quite the contrary), but the Kelo v. New London ruling is short-sighted. The state can take property for public uses, but what *is* a ‘public use’? Justice O’Connor notes three: 1) when the land is publicly owned, 2) when it’s privately owned but available to the public, and 3) where the result serves a “public purpose”. As defined in Kelo, anything that might yield benefits (jobs, tax revenue, etc) qualifies.

Liberals love it, conservatives hate it. It seems to me there is a fundamentally flawed premise in using eminent domain for development purposes: that we must wipe the slate clean and put in a new piece of city instead of developing incrementally, block-by-block. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need it since it’s purpose is to facilitate land assembly for developers (profit or non-profit), since bigger is more viable economically. Yet, with rare exceptions, the resultant urban form from mega-projects is poor (in rare occations where it isn’t, it means huge costs, which either means gentrification or corporate campuses or entertainment/shopping complexes.

Well, I hate to let history get in the way of a good thing here, but we’ve been there, done that. And it was a miserable failure. Retro is all the rage these days, but I didn’t think mining past failures was cool. The last time eminent domain was given such wide latitude, people were forcefully removed and neighborhoods were gutted to make way for highways (which we are now removing). For every ‘good’ use of eminent domain, there are 10 bad ones. If you are concerned about the negative effects of speculators, there are other ways of motivating change. Frankly, I am surprised that urban planners and urban designers are cheering this ruling. We should be encouraging small-scale, incremental, bottom-up growth to create good stable neighborhoods, not encouraging land-grabs for large-scale top-down development. Helping disadvantaged communities is not easy, for sure – but like drug addicts who can’t break the habit, planners and cities are falling off the wagon, taking short-cuts with peoples’ lives. Communities deserve better. And urban planners can do better.