[lbo-talk] When is private property NOT?

[joanna]

The proof will be in the pudding. There are a number of rich city/poor 
city twins: for example, Palo Alto (rich) and east Palo Alto (their 
servants). In Oakland, there's a very lovely neighborhood called West 
Oakland full of huge old Victorians that now belong to mostly poor black 
familities...within a stone's throw of downtown Oakland, full of office 
buildings full of yuppies who wouldn't mind a walk to work.. I wonder 
how long it will take, while we're still in this real-estate mania, for 
the city to "realize" that a lot of poor folks are sitting on property 
that is worth five to ten times what it's "compensatory value" might be. 
When the dot com boom was going on, a lot of poor people got evicted 
from their houses by landlords who wanted to double or triple rents. 
This will be the ratcheting up of the process to include poor property 
owners. Why not? Especially if you've drummed it into people that the 
collective good can only be realized by the expansion of capital. Ever 
heard of "trickle down"? Who, after all, are these selfish property 
owners to stand in the way of progress. You see? The spin would be very 
easy.

Joanna

Doug Henwood wrote:


> Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>> Jim:
>>
>>>  Collective rights represent only a _potential_ for good. Also, some
>>>  protection of individual rights is needed.
>>
>>
>> Individual rights and private ownership of land are two different and
>> largely antithetical things.  Eminent domain pertains almost 
>> exclusively to
>> private ownership of land - which in my book is abomination and theft 
>> since
>> people do not produce land hence have no basis for claiming property 
>> rights
>> over it.  It is theft because it denies the use of a natural 
>> non-produced
>> item to other people.
>
>
> But Woj, this case was about the ability of cities to seize property 
> for commercial development - e.g., the replacement of privately owned 
> residential property with privately owned Wal-Marts.
>
>> As far as urban development is concerned, the eminent domain is only
>> tangentially related to it.  Zoning, land use and housing is really a
>> cover-up for class and race divisions.  Here in Baltimore, the city 
>> was sued
>> by ACLU for "warehousing" the poor in highly segregated and dismal 
>> housing
>> projects - the city lost and some of the worst projects were 
>> demolished, and
>> new housing (under the Hope VI project) was built in their place.
>
>
> The history of most "urban renewal" in the U.S. is the clearing of 
> working-class housing and its replacement with commercial properties, 
> highways, and luxury housing. The prototype was the redevelopment of 
> New Haven in the 1950s and 1960s, under the joint guidance of Sen. 
> Prescott Bush and Yale University. It turned housing into a 
> now-abandoned shopping mall, and put up a wretched highway called the 
> Oak Street Connector that bisected a neighborhood. I thought this was 
> just the sort of thing you hate.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>