Culture of Congestion  

Latest Posts  |  Archive  | 

A moratorium on eminent domain? An eminent idea!

by Sandy Ikeda
Thu, 10 Apr 2008

Print

Send

RSS

Share:

Mayor Bloomberg and a host of New York mega-developers, including Bruce Ratner, may be squirming a bit as David Paterson becomes governor on Monday. As a member of the state legislature, Paterson called for a state-wide moratorium on what he described as a "gold rush" of the use of eminent domain across the state. You can read the Sun article here.

(For the time being, the slumping economy seems itself to be imposing its own kind of moratorium on large-scale public and private construction, as I wrote here.)

Such a moratorium would at least temporarily stop local projects that rely on the takings power of the state, including the Columbia University expansion in Harlem, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and Willets Point in Queens. In the last case, for instance, we're not talking about a lone hold-out blocking the construction of a public utility, but virtually an entire business community digging in its heels against a Mayor who wants to uproot it to impose his own vision of "economic development." (See my earlier blog on the taking of Willets Point.)

The Mayor has reportedly said: "You would never build any big thing any place in any big city in this country if you didn't have the power of eminent domain." That's a half-truth. The whole truth is that without the backing of the government's power to take private property, private developers would have to pay the actual rather than the so-called "fair" market value for the scarce urban space they want to build on. In a free market that would almost certainly mean fewer mega-projects, but it wouldn't bring them to an end — just the economically unjustified ones.

So, a moratorium on eminent domain would be good. Making it permanent would be even better.

Culture of Congestion Homepage