If someone had predicted 14 months ago that the right of government bodies to force the sale of private properties under the rule of eminent domain would spark a national roar of outrage and become a hot-button political issue in Minnesota, the poor fellow’s friends would have shushed him.
But in June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Kelo v. New London, a property-rights case. Susette Kelo and other homeowners in New London, Connecticut, had sued the city to prevent a seizure of their neighborhood. The land their homes occupied was slated for a project that included a hotel, conference center, state park, and new homes and retail space. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city.
Unlike most bombshell decisions, the Kelo ruling changed nothing about existing law in Connecticut or anywhere else. Instead, the five-to-four decision says that the court could find no constitutional basis to overturn the state’s eminent domain law. Kelo wasn’t a change but an awakening.
Developers have been astonished to learn of their cozy relationship with local governments and their power to crush helpless neighborhoods.
The major point of controversy was that Connecticut cities could use eminent domain not just to clear the way for public-use projects, such as roads, schools, parks, or fire stations, but also to enable private developments such as hotels, housing, office parks, or retail complexes that cities deem as serving a public purpose. Cities had broad discretion in defining a public purpose, which could take such forms as higher property-tax revenue, creation of jobs, and economic development of blighted areas—or even nonblighted ones. “In Kelo, nobody said [the plaintiff’s] property was blighted or in bad condition,” notes Mark Savin, a partner with Faegre & Benson, LLP, a law firm in Minneapolis.
At the time of the Kelo ruling, six other states, including Minnesota, had eminent-domain laws very similar to Connecticut’s. Minnesota’s legislation, in place for decades, allowed the seizure of private property for private development. It did not seriously restrict the ability of a government body to define “blight.” In fact, the law didn’t even require that a property be found blighted in order to be condemned, says Peter Coyle, an attorney for Larkin Hoffman Daly & Lindgren, Ltd., a law firm in Minneapolis. As things stood, “you possibly could have been talking about [seizing] a brand new house. Minnesota law required only that a city council, for example, determine an overall benefit to the public [arising from the new development].”
