In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court decided that local governments can seize people’s homes or businesses, against their will, for private development. This means that if city officials prefer to see, for example, an office building where your home is located, they can force you to sell your property to a developer at what they determine to be a fair market price.

This officially drives the stake through the heart of any remaining property rights that we may have thought we had. The government now has full consent to take anyone’s property, as long as they determine it will be ‘upgraded’.

In the court’s decision, they state the city’s claim that the company buying the land will bring 1,000 new jobs to the town. The court’s majority claim that these jobs will be a benefit to the entire community, concluding that this property seizure falls within the ‘public use’ clause of the 5th amendment.

Justice O’Conner does a great job of summarizing the potential impact in this quote from her dissent:

Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power. Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded—i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public—in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings “for public use” is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property—and thereby effectively to delete the words “for public use” from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

So if the legislature decides the ‘new use’ is more beneficial to the public, your property is fair game. This puts the power in the hands of those with the most political influence. If a person is in negotiations with a wealthy developer who wants to buy their house, and the developer feels that they are asking for too much, he now has another option. Throw some money into a few city council member’s campaign funds, and now the person is forced to sell at the city’s fair price.

This decision is wrong, and anti-American. Private property was one of the principals on which this country was founded. Now any individual’s property can be taken, and handed to another, for the ‘benefit of the community’.

My property should be just that, mine. If a developer wants to buy it, he should make me an offer. If we can’t agree on a price, he should look for some other location. I guess that is just too simple.