SCOTUS Loves Gentrification

It's a victory for bourgie technocrats nationwide

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A divided Supreme Court ruled that local
governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for
private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where
economic growth conflicts with individual property rights.
Thursday's 5-4
ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are
slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that
cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public
use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.
As a result,
cities now have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping
malls and hotel complexes in order to generate tax revenue.
Local officials,
not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will
benefit the community, justices said.
"The city has carefully formulated an
economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the
community, including -- but by no means limited to -- new jobs and increased tax
revenue," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
He was joined by
Justice Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G.
Breyer.
At issue was the scope of the Fifth Amendment, which allows
governments to take private property through eminent domain if the land is for
"public use."
Susette Kelo and several other homeowners in a working-class
neighborhood in New London, Conn., filed suit after city officials announced
plans to raze their homes for a riverfront hotel, health club and
offices.