How odd that liberals on the U.S. Supreme Court have come down on the side of influential corporations and their profits, and against less resourceful homeowners. At least that's the view of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor who wrote the dissenting opinion in Thursday's appalling 5-4 decision that allows local governments to seize homes, businesses and other private property to hand over to big profit-driven developers.
For some, it should be the conservative justices who would endorse an assault on homeownership to make big business happy. But it wasn't. The court's three most conservative justices--William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas--joined O'Connor in the dissent. The court's most liberal justices were solidly on the side of this expansion of government's eminent domain powers at the expense of homeowners.
To understand how court liberals made this remarkable jump over the political fence, it helps to understand the mindset of the American Planning Society, based in Chicago. The group, which argued before the court in support of this outcome, embodies the view that government, not the marketplace, should decide where growth occurs--in central cities and inner suburbs. | Ah yes, nothing like central planning to ensure a thriving economy, isn't that right, comrade? |
Toward that end, the 37,000-member group of urban planners and other like-minded individuals believes in the wisdom of condemning property and handing it over to economic interests that could better use it for the "public good"--the public good being whatever local government decides, as the group spelled out in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the high court.
It is 1950s urban renewal all over again, but worse.
Back then, entire neighborhoods were wiped out so they could be replaced by public uses such as highways, parks and civic centers. One example: Chicago condemned miles of "slums" to build its infamous string of public housing high-rises along the Dan Ryan Expressway. Whatever the value of the public housing (much of it now has been torn down), the point is that the condemnation was for a public use--public housing for the impoverished. Liberals came to abhor "urban removal" and other wholesale leveling of neighborhoods. Instead, they reveled in the overarching value of small, cohesive, diverse, vital but poor neighborhoods. The view probably was best enunciated in Jane Jacobs' revered book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." In this, they are right; the healthiest cities are made up of healthy, human-scale neighborhoods.
At the same time, liberals and urban planners hated the sprawling shopping centers, office parks and supposed absence of a sense of neighborhood that characterized the suburbs. Thus, the American Planning Society says it is "centrally concerned" with redirecting growth back to central cities and inner-ring suburbs. A "critically important" tool to carry out this goal is eminent domain, to allow so-called community development agencies or corporations to build job-rich and tax-producing business and commercial development. So, here's the irony: A liberal Supreme Court now makes possible the destruction of human-scale neighborhoods, with their ma-and-pa stores and affordable housing, in order to build despised, but revenue-generating, shopping malls and office parks--usually at the expense of poor people.
As O'Connor said in her strongly worded dissent: "Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The founders cannot have intended this perverse result."
How have we gotten to this point, where conservative judges are standing up for persons with fewer resources and liberal justices are backing the play of the powerful and influential? Perhaps the cynic would say it's because liberals salivate over any chance to enlarge government power, and because conservatives are willing to go to any lengths--even to backing the little guy--to advance property rights.
The more important question, though, is: Is it right? The court has denied homeowners a constitutional protection against assaults by out-of-control local government. In response, those wishing to protect the little guy will have to be more vigilant at the local level, and ultimately fight to replace those elected officials who don't respect the basic right of domicile.
Or, better yet, to replace the Supreme Court justices who endorsed this assault.
Dennis Byrne, a Chicago-area writer and consultant 
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