You sometimes really surprise me. On the one hand, you embrace positions of the likes of Fitch, who points out the backwardness of the enshrined "left" institutions like the unions in order to call for a sweeping reform, or the likes of Harvey who criticizes the Left for knee-jerk embracing the agenda of individual rights which inadvertently plays into the hands of the Right. So you are clearly capable of scrutinizing and criticizing the popular positions of the Left, but then, you turn around and embrace similar positions whose criticism you just endorsed. Why?
The critique of the eminent domain by the likes you just mention amounts to the latter days Luddism - knee-jerk opposition to capitalist innovation on the grounds that it hurts "the people." AFIK, the Marxist left explicitly rejected such a backward, reactionary position. Capitalism has always been about innovation, and Marx's point was not do stop that innovation and the machinery it created, but to use it to the benefit of all rather than the select few. If you take clues from his passage on the British rule in India, he saw such capitalist innovation destroying the existing social arrangements a good thing, because it created better material conditions than those it destroyed. This is true regardless of the fact that the benefits of those better material conditions are at the moment confined to a few. The point of a socialist transformation is not to destroy the engine that produced those better material conditions, but to distribute their benefits more equitably.
Like any capitalist project, the urban development that the latter days Luddites criticize creates both, private profits and public benefits: jobs, tax base, better and safer environment, neighborhood effects - to name a few. It creates better material conditions than the slums and the junkyards it destroys. It also comes at a cost, which is upsetting the people who live in those slums and have stakes in those junkyards, and who naturally oppose the development for that reason. However, the "real" issue - at least from the traditional Marxist viewpoint - is to balance the views and stakes of those who are affected by this development with the material benefit and larger public interest, and to make sure that the material benefit goes to the public coffers, not just the private pockets.
My problem with the discussion of this issue on this list is that with the exception of Nathan, Marvin, and myself - there is little attempt to frame this issue in terms of material cost and benefits produced by development, and in terms of a broader public benefit, and a larger vision for society as a whole. What I see instead is knee-jerk populism, uncritical siding with the "little guy," and a knee-jerk attack on the popular demons (yuppies, developers, and the city hall). If that position prevailed, it would result in the preservation of slums and junkyards and the rejection of new development. Again, this is latter-days Luddism - that historically led nowhere and has nothing to show as a success story. At least what Nathan is proposing offers a vision of a materially better future - those of livable cities with sufficient tax base to provide public services. Perhaps when the dust settles, that vision may turn out to be an illusion, or perhaps not - but at least it offers a promise of a materially better condition. By contrast, the opponents of the development offer no vision at all - just the Luddite obstructionism and preservation of property rights that at the end of the day will leave us with what we already have: the slums and the junkyards.
It was the reformers and "insiders" like Nathan who historically produced social change and the betterment of the material living conditions in this country, whatever they are worth, (cf. William Gamson, _The Strategy of Social Protest_ ), whereas the populist nay-sayers, Luddites and their tough-talking radical supporters have literally nothing to show.
Wojtek