Your property can be taken for any reason

In Connecticut, your property can be taken for any reason.

In West Haven, that reason was a 23acre shopping center called The Haven.

There is nothing wrong with a shopping center. It’s just the way this one came into being. The process started in 2015 with the approval of the Haven South Municipal Development Plan. Residents of the First Avenue corridor were soon told they had to ‘get out’ or risk having their property taken by Eminent Domain to make room for the shopping center.

‘Eminent Domain’ means that the government can take your property against your will. It is allowed under the Constitution for Public Use, which is for things like a highway or a school. But in West Haven, Public Use was a shopping center-a private venture which will reap millions of dollars in tax benefits.

A shopping center is not Public Use. But the interpretation of the takings clause has become so corrupted that now in Connecticut your property can be taken for any reason. The municipality just needs a plan like the Haven South Municipal Development Plan, where the project is declared and boilerplate language from Connecticut law is regurgitated. Presto-Public Use. The winners in this scenario are the consulting firms who write the plans and the developers who implement them. The losers are the taxpayers and the folks who once inhabited the homes and ran the family businesses in the neighborhood.

The 2005 Kelo vs the City of New London decision gave municipal governments wide latitude to condemn property by fiat. Such ‘economic development’ takings don’t fit the classical public uses. Now, Public Use is anything the municipal government says it is. By approving the Municipal Development Plan, municipal governments give themselves authority to override the traditional norms.

This discretion leads to subjective results. For example, to use Eminent Domain the City must consider the benefit to the public and conclude that the public benefits outweigh the private benefits. But the public benefits are not substantiated-they are declared. A popular benefit which finds its way into most Municipal Development Plans is jobs. No one really knows how many jobs will be created. And no one ever mentions the jobs that are lost. Why is the creation of a job worth more than someone’s home and the life that goes on there?

Connecticut law also states that no property may be acquired under an economic development taking for the primary purpose of increasing tax revenue. The Municipal Development Plan says this, but city officials still tell the citizens how much tax revenue the project will generate. And to make sure that none of the existing properties are incorporated into the new project, the Municipal Development Plan states that the properties’ ‘current use cannot be integrated into the development plan’. In an attempt to gentrify at the expense of long-term taxpayers, West Haven chose Coach and Tiffany over Hallock’s and Nick’s.

It’s too late to turn back on The Haven. People have moved, buildings have been torn down, and the developer has spent millions of dollars. But society pays a dear price when its government decides that it knows better than the people who actually live there what should happen to a neighborhood. In this case, the neighborhood was to be sacrificed to make way for richer, shinier, bigger and emptier.