Friday, December 14, 2007

Private Property: Square Circle?

You probably think you have a good idea how bad Kelo was for property owners. You have no idea.
The new agreement, forged Monday, allows Corcoran Jennison six months — until May 29, 2008 — to secure financing for the construction of 66 luxury apartments and 14 townhouses on a 4-acre tract formerly occupied by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
In other words, the developer for whose benefit the city of New London stole people's property hasn't even got financing for the development that was supposed to bring prosperity and happiness to the area. When will something useful actually be done with the land?
If financing is arranged, it would allow a late June 2008 groundbreaking and completion of the housing project by Dec. 26, 2009 — the same date required had the company met the original financing deadline last month, NLDC President Michael Joplin said.
So there's your optimistic date - four and a half years after the Supreme Court greenlighted the noxious plan in an awful, embarrassing decision (Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, in case you wanted me to name names [note that some people decried the decision as a product of a conservative Rehnquist Court! Again - Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer; lots of Federalist Society members there, right?]), New London may finally start seeing a return on its Faustian bargain. I'm no economics expert, but whiskey-tango-foxtrot, guys?!

Also comforting:
If it fails to come up with the money for the housing portion of the project, the developer would forfeit all rights to that housing as well as two office buildings and a hotel it planned to build without litigation and would allow the NLDC to seek another developer.
This is basically the effect of Kelo: the government can seize your property not only when it has a solid plan for using your property in a more publicly useful way, but it can also just take your property whenever it thinks there might be someone better able to take advantage of your property than you, and sit on the stuff until that white knight comes along. So, really, any parcel of land the size of a Wal-Mart should be considered potentially condemned, because one of these days, Wal-Mart might get around to wanting to put a new store there!

Quick question: if New London was really poorly off, economically, before this whole affair, what about now, when they've driven people out of the area (by taking their homes) and created massive bad publicity for themselves? Well, whatever; yay Communism!

1 Comments:

At 1:03 PM, December 17, 2007 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

"You have no idea"Do you? “There is, moreover, no principled way of distinguishing economic development from the other public purposes that we have recognized.” - This KELO Majority rule.

Properly functioning governments, are governments that are held to certain definable restrictions, and these restrictions are not to be simply left up to their own governments rights to experiment in such unprincipled ways.
And surely our Constitution was not meant to be isolated from its effective use, as it is now being said to be a permissibly perishable thing, under this control of man made laws, for it is these governments themselves which make these laws, and it would not then be of any sensible assurances to us, when our legislatures have proclaimed that they are the ones controlling themselves.

When the Supreme court admitted that it has neither the authority nor the inclinations to describe for a nation what government thievery is, it has at the same time attempted to claim for itself that it still retains its own inclinations, and thus its own authority, to describe for a nation what government thievery is not.

This convoluted reasoning, and this twisted logic, has now made it perfectly clear that this nation can not rely on the judgments of those who rest upon their own opinions of us. We must decide for ourselves what others are claiming is an unascribable national thing, or we will once again be a nation of people who must be lead by their detachable masters own certainties, and not a people who have designed perceivable restraints upon their governments.
If this nation is not capable of controlling what it has created, then what it has created will twist and shape itself until it is no longer recognizable.

Not to deny that these atrocities are tending to Intensify themselves expediently, but to deny that they are rightly to continue upon there own success in one part of our nation and not in the next.

 

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