>In the absolute majority of cases, cities exercise eminent domain
>only as a last resort and there is plenty of public hearings.
This has never been the case in Los Angeles, where today blight means prime real estate in a gentrifying area. In the 60s eminent domain was used to raze some of the city's oldest neighborhoods to make room for a baseball stadium and a financial district. In the space of a few years the city's historic core was essentially disappeared. Now the downtown core is gentrifying and you see ads for condos that say "Live on the Edge". Eminent domain is less necessary for the gentrification, because the first round didn't leave anything standing but high rises.
Some of the best literature about Los Angeles in recent years has in common themes of memory and loss. You can get in on the fun too with Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986:
http://www.ecampus.com/book/3775712801
"Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 is an interactive DVD-ROM exploring the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, it is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning sixty-six years: At the center is Molly--based on a real-life person--who may be hiding a murder. She lives within a three square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. This neighborhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. Out of this rich blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible. Within this multi-layered narrative space, the tone is ironic and spontaneous, as if it is still in the making.