Why are California Dems in
local government embracing eminent domain abuse?
Guest Opinion
By Matt Welch
|  When
the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London
that local governments could seize your house and sell
it to Wal-Mart without running afoul of the United States
Constitution, it set off a shudder of public revulsion
from New England to South-Central Los Angeles. A whopping
93 percent of Granite State residents in a July University
of New Hampshire poll opposed using eminent domain for
private development. Newspaper editorial boards, in
states both red and blue, roundly condemned the decision,
with one notable exception. (See "Why The New York
Times ? Eminent Domain " October 2005.) Legislators
in more than two dozen states have made at least preliminary
noises about restricting the practice, with Alabama
first out of the gate with a new law. Many politicians
from the Democratic Party—not normally known for
championing property rights—understood Kelo as
a tool for the rich to screw the poor, and as an affront
to Americans’ very way of life.
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"It’s like undermining motherhood and apple pie,"
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), a fire-breathing lefty from
South-Central Los Angeles, told the San Francisco Chronicle
after she co-sponsored a successful House amendment blocking
the use of federal funds in cities that engage in private-to-private
eminent domain transfers. "I mean, people’s homes
and their land—it’s very important, and it should
be protected by government, not taken for somebody else’s
private use."
But while Waters’ folksy wisdom matched literally every
reaction to Kelo I heard from left-of-center acquaintances
in L.A., it did not resonate with her fellow California Democrats
who work in the trenches of local governance. For them, eminent
domain has become a crucial, regrettably routine shortcut
for "redeveloping" run-down areas, speeding up gentrification
of hip neighborhoods, and otherwise doling out favors to anyone
promising the sales tax revenue on which their municipal governments
depend.
In May the Los Angeles City Council approved a $325 million
project at the famous intersection of Hollywood and Vine,
including a fancy new 296-room W Hotel. The project would
displace, among others, the Bernard Luggage store, which has
stuck by the neighborhood through thick and mostly thin for
the last 55 years. When it was approved, L.A.’s City
News Service reports, City Councilman Eric Garcetti "said
the city would not use its powers of eminent domain to force
property owners to sell, unless the developers were unable
to reach a deal with the land owners."
In other words, the government won’t take your property
unless you refuse to sell. This Don Corleone–style approach
can be found all over California, especially in neighborhoods
(such as Hollywood and Vine) that are no longer covered under
any meaningful definition of the word blight. (State law establishes
blight as the precondition for private-to-private eminent
domain transfers.) The W Hotel isn’t about to invest
in Skid Row, but it sure does get annoyed when pesky luggage
stores make it harder to tap into a resurgent neighborhood.
Ditto for a huge mixed-retail project slated for downtown
Alhambra, in East L.A. County, where tax-greedy local pols
drool over the prospect of replicating the retail redevelopment
nirvana of nearby Pasadena and are willing to label as "blighted"
a whopping 60 businesses, including the Museum of Contemporary
Arab Art. Blight has become such an elastic term of convenience
that the sparsely populated California City, near Edwards
Air Force Base, has declared "blighted" a patch
of unused desert coveted by Hyundai.
The paradox is that eminent domain abuse is seared into the
historical consciousness of Southern California’s Democrat-leaning
poor people. Dodger Stadium was infamously built on land stolen
from thousands of working-class Latino families, a vile act
of property violence that has inspired a recent best-selling
book, a popular local play, a well-reviewed documentary, and
a Ry Cooder CD. In downtown L.A., multigeneration immigrant
communities (and priceless Victorian homes) were leveled in
the 1970s and ’80s to build sterile office towers for
white-shoe law firms. The 105 and 10 freeways ripped ugly
seams through poor black communities. Hollywood Star Lanes,
the hardscrabble and locally revered bowling alley made famous
in The Big Lebowski, was seized from its original owners to
build a mammoth school in a crappy neighborhood. And Indio,
a city adjacent to Palm Springs, razed an entire black neighborhood
in 1993 to make way for a shopping mall expansion that never
took place. Obscenely, Indio officials are now trying to buy
out two minority churches nearby to clear way for yet another
promised extension.
Southern California has always been a political trendsetter,
from property tax revolts to immigration crackdowns to the
rejection of taxpayer financing for football stadiums. If
the disconnect between its Democratic residents and politicians
over eminent domain continues to widen, we can only hope another
revolt is around the corner.
Matt Welch is a native of Long Beach, California who
has lived in Los Angeles since 1998.
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