A friend of mine passed along this AP article on the fate of the property acquired by the City of New London that was the subject of the Kelo v. City of New London case handed down by the Supreme Court in 2005.
Turns out the City didn’t need the property that badly after all. The development for which the City exercised the power of eminent domain seems to have collapsed.
Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation’s most notorious eminent domain project.
There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.
. . .
In New London the city’s prized economic development plan has fallen apart as the economy crumbled.The Corcoran Jennison Cos., a Boston-based developer, had originally locked in exclusive rights to develop nearly the entire northern half of the Fort Trumbull peninsula.
But those rights expired in June 2008, despite multiple extensions, because the firm was unable to secure financing, according to President Marty Jones.
In July, backers halted fundraising for the project’s crown jewel, a proposed $60 million, 60,000-square-foot Coast Guard museum.
The legal decision didn’t bother me. The project, as described in the Supreme Court case — as opposed to the media reports about the Supreme Court case, did not strike me as such a departure from tradition. It was a big project with a lot of public use and, yes, some private use, but it was not a simple matter of seizing land from one person and handing it to another.
But, jeeze, make sure you can get the job done once the land is acquired. This is a horrible waste. Sometimes I’ll tell a client or potential client, “Are you really sure you want to do this? Because this sounds like the kind of case where nobody is going to win but me.” Looks like this ended up being one of those cases.
Really? I remember imagining at the time it was my congenital cynicism, not case law, that made me suspect this wasn’t quite the first time ED had been used to further an explicitly private enterprise, and that the Court had based its decision on the more recent legal notion of So Long As Wealthy People Are Getting Wealthier, They’re Bound To Drop Some Money And Not Notice, Or Be Too Busy To Bother Picking It Up.
Of course, by the time this thing became a national cause célèbre and chewtoy for the World’s Third-Worst State Legislature™ it’d been taken over by people who seemed to believe this was the first time the ED itself had ever been claimed, and was based on a misinterpreted footnote to one of William O. Douglas’ opinions, so I sorta lost interest.