"New York State has the most developer-friendly eminent-domain laws in the country."
Yes, old-time urban renewal is back in style-and eminent domain, urban renewal's best friend, is back, too. The Durst Organization, long in pursuit of the small buildings on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, recently got the Empire State Development Corporation to condemn them. Soon Durst will begin construction there on a tower for Bank of America, to be called 1 Bryant Park and financed with $650 million worth of post-9/11 Liberty Bonds.
The right of eminent domain, or the state's ability to seize land for public use (paying the owners fair market value), is longstanding. But over the years the phrase "public use" has taken on broader and broader meaning. According to Norman Siegel, the civil-rights lawyer and former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a 1954 Supreme Court decision allowing land to be taken by a public agency put the court's stamp on the urban-renewal boom that followed. A 1981 decision in Michigan, allowing a neighborhood to be condemned for a GM plant, transformed eminent domain into the voracious creature it is today. "From my perspective," says Siegel, "eminent domain has run amok."
In New York, we associate the abuse of eminent domain with Robert Moses, who, as of the head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, amassed enough power to remap the city. He built the Cross Bronx Expressway, Lincoln Center, the New York Coliseum, and much more. If Moses had had his way, there would be a highway where Soho sits, and a cluster of towers instead of the West Village. Moses did for eminent domain what Vietnam did for war: He made it into something no one wanted to be associated with for a long time. But times have changed, war is back, and so is eminent domain.
In truth, neither really went away. The redevelopment of Times Square relied heavily on seized property along 42nd Street. So does the planned New York Times tower on Eighth Avenue. What's changed is that big rebuilding schemes are back in style. That's partly attributable to Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, who's leading the 2012 Olympics bid and all the development that the Games would bring. Public interest in the new World Trade Center also taught many officials about the power of architecture. Daniel Libeskind has sixteen acres of lower Manhattan, more or less, at his disposal; Sir Norman Foster is building one of his extraordinary Erector-set towers atop the Hearst Building on 57th Street; Frank Gehry is onboard for the Brooklyn Nets arena. This eagerness to build anew, however, brings with it an impatience to clear away impediments or, as Moses infamously put it, "hack your way with a meat ax."
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<http://www.gothamgazette.com/iotw/condemned/>
Sales are strong at Minic Custom Woodwork in East Harlem, but co-owner Bill Minic is afraid that he will soon have to shut down the furniture factory that has been in his family for 70 years -- put out of business not by the recession or by competition, but by a government agency.
The Empire State Development Corporation, a state agency that promotes businesses in New York, has plans to condemn Minic Custom Woodwork and 11 other businesses near it, buy the land from them at a court-determined price, and resell it to a private developer to build a Home Depot, the giant home repair chain.
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<http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20051212/200/1678>
In New York City, the government's power to take over private property -- eminent domain -- is a factor in so many pending development projects that the one involving Joy Chatel's home is actually among the least-known current battles.
In Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, the real estate developer Forest City Ratner Companies has a proposal to take over private homes and businesses and replace them with the Atlantic Yards project, a basketball arena, thousands of condos, and 16 towers.
In upper Manhattan, Columbia University is considering eminent domain as an option in its efforts to expand its campus. And in Willets Point, Queens, the city is looking to replace a 13-block area that is home to scrap metal yards and auto shops with a waterfront shopping district to complement a new stadium for the New York Mets.
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<http://www.reason.com/0510/co.mw.why.shtml>
October 2005
Why The New York Times ©s Eminent Domain Elite newspapers and liberal activists embrace the Kelo decision at their long-term peril. Matt Welch
On September 24, 2001, as New York firefighters were still picking their comrades' body parts out of the World Trade Center wreckage, New York Times Co. Vice Chairman and Senior Vice President Michael Golden announced that the Gray Lady was ready to do its part in the healing.
"We believe there could not be a greater contribution," Golden told a clutch of city officials and journalists, "than to have the opportunity to start construction of the first major icon building in New York City after the tragic events of Sept. 11." Bruce Ratner, president of the real estate development company working with the Times on its proposed new Eighth Avenue headquarters, called the project a "very important testament to our values, culture and democratic ideals."
Those "values" and "democratic ideals" included using eminent domain to forcibly evict 55 businesses-including a trade school, a student housing unit, a Donna Karan outlet, and several mom-and-pop stores-against their will, under the legal cover of erasing "blight," in order to clear ground for a 52-story skyscraper. The Times and Ratner, who never bothered making an offer to the property owners, bought the Port Authority-adjacent property at a steep discount ($85 million) from a state agency that seized the 11 buildings on it; should legal settlements with the original tenants exceed that amount, taxpayers will have to make up the difference. On top of that gift, the city and state offered the Times $26 million in tax breaks for the project, and Ratner even lobbied to receive $400 million worth of U.S. Treasury-backed Liberty Bonds-instruments created by Congress to help rebuild Lower Manhattan. Which is four miles away.
If you think the Times' editorial division would be outraged to see the business side trampling the Little Guy, you probably haven't been following the political evolution of the nation's leading newspapers. For decades now, the country's elite dailies and those papers that emulate them have deliberately eschewed individual stories in favor of broader "trend" pieces (especially when it comes to crime); routinely endorsed government action to cure society's ills; and mocked the "tabloid" populism of the more right-leaning media organizations that dwell on single cases of outrage. Like the activist who loves The People but despises every actual person he meets, the Times' editorial page takes liberal stands when the issue is safely abstract-but when it comes to the paper's profits and political battles, the Little Guy can get bent.