California Democrats abusing eminent domain

California Democrats have used the Kelo ruling to make avaible property otherwise protected under the Constitution. 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 depends.

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 for 55 years. When it was approved, L.A.'s City New Service report, 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 reah 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 whoping 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 Bae, has decleared "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 pla, a well-reviewed documentary, and a RY Cooder CD. In downtown L.A., multigeneration immigrant communites (and priceless Victorin homes) were leveled in the 1970s and 1980s to build sterile office tower for white-shoe law firms. The 105 and 10 freeways ripped ugly seams through poor black communites. Hollywood Star Lanes, the hardscrabble and locally revered bowling alley made famous in The Big Lebowski, was seized from it's original owners to build a mammoth school in a crappy neighborhood. And Indio, a city next to Palm Spring, razed an entire black neighborhood in 1993 to make way for a shopping mall expansion tht 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 an only hope another revolt is around the corner.