What is just compensation?
The fifth amendment specifies that owners of land taken by the .gov for public use receive just compensation. How just is just? A bill in Indiana may specify that said compensation is 150% of assessed value. I don’t find it unreasonable that just compensation include potential earnings on property as well.
March 16th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
Sounds good to me. Plus limiting “public use” to actual public use, not to turn it over to other private owners, of course. Some of the most poisonous court decisions of the last century concerned using eminent domain to gather land for some kind of development project – justified by the higher taxes expected post-redevelopment. We should have horsewhipped the first lawyer representing the government who suggested that the people exist to pay taxes, and hanged every judge who agreed with him.
March 16th, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Tough call. The part that gives me trouble is how do you end eminent domain abuse without potentially rewarding slum lords and blighted property owners? How do you create a program that doesn’t give such owners and incentive to say “I’ll just hang onto it until the government takes it and pays me more than I could get on the open market?”
That’s the tough nut: you need eminent domain to help crack down on blight and slum lords, but as it currently exists, it’s oft-abused.
March 16th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
tgirsch…if you stop eminent domaining property just to turn it over to developers, that will stop any potential abuse. If you restrict eminent domain to legitimate public projects, citys and towns shouldn’t care about the condition of the property being bought.
March 17th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Manish:
I get that part. But do you then just shrug and say “hey, there’s nothing at all we can do to improve these blighted neighborhoods?” Eminent domain may not be the answer here, but you have to have a way to force people to either improve their property, tear it down, or sell it. Otherwise they can just hang on to that eye-sore of an abandoned warehouse forever, thus dragging down the surrounding property values, just because they don’t want to spend the money for the improvements.
March 17th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
tgirsch, you do that by threatening condemnation by enforcing existing zoning laws. I.e., either clean it up, or we’ll take it with no compensation.