Letter from Phil Langdon in Hartford

I am posting an article by Phil Langdon (below the fold) because I believe that the use (which too often means misuse and abuse) of eminent domain in governmental "economic development" programs
1. is morally repulsive in itself, and the Fort Trumbull neighborhood situation seems to me to offer a regrettably fine example ; 
2. injures the urban planning enterprise by associating it with over-reaching governmental policies and thus diminishes its standing in the population as a whole;
3. is simply not needed as a tool of urban planning.

Many liberals may believe that because the opponents of eminent domain are often from the far right then their arguments can be safely ignored. That is wrong; and I ask my fellow liberals to reconsider that position.

I largely agree with Phi though I think we part company when he offers that "an outright
prohibition might hamper worthwhile undertakings, such as the removal of junkyards and oil tank farms from waterfronts" as I think that considering the abuse, we can live with a few junkyards and oil tank farms here and there until their economic life is finished.

When Government Takes Too Much

By PHILIP LANGDON

Whether the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes it or not, an injustice has
taken place in New London. Now the question is how to prevent similar
injustices in the future.

Many people ‹ in New London and across North America ‹ are disturbed by
the way the New London Development Corporation (NLDC) set about ousting
property owners from a 90-acre section of the city's Fort Trumbull
neighborhood. Jane Jacobs, author of the most esteemed urban book of
the past half-century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
says "the clear-cutting of neighborhoods like Fort Trumbull is
antithetical to the development of healthy, vibrant mixed-use
communities." John Norquist, mayor of Milwaukee for 15 years before
becoming president of the Congress for New Urbanism, says that when
government has to resort to eminent domain to carry out economic
development, often the projects don't make economic sense.

Until I visited what's left of the neighborhood after extensive
bulldozing, I had assumed that Pfizer's $270 million research complex
would spin off tremendous benefits for nearby sections of the city.
Naïve me. What I found, on a peninsula down the Thames River from
downtown New London, was a 23-acre private compound ‹ 700,000 square
feet of buildings plus an ample amount of open space ‹ retreating
behind a guarded gatehouse. If you so much as aim a camera toward the
complex from a public overlook, as I did, security personnel will come
question what you're doing.

There is little chance that the Pfizer complex, with its 1,500
physicians, researchers, and other employees, will eventually become
part of a lively urban neighborhood. It has been designed as an
isolated corporate campus rather than a workplace intimately connected
to its neighbors. Perhaps the self-imposed isolation seemed essential
to a company involved in competitive, sometimes controversial
pharmaceutical research, but it defeated the possibility of breathing
new life into an old city. The complex's only major contributions to
New London are likely to be tax revenue (which the city certainly
needs) and employment (also needed in a city with a 7.6 percent
unemployment rate).

NLDC's goal of improving the rest of the peninsula ‹ the part beyond
the Pfizer compound ‹ must have seemed logical in the abstract. The
original Pfizer project had broad support, it was viewed as a
once-in-a-lifetime boost to the city's moribund economy. With it in
hand, NLDC began tossing out huge numbers, $750 million in development
in just two years, for the rest of the property.

But the plan that the NLDC devised, and the way it was carried out,
were an affront to fair play ‹ which helps explain why the case of Kelo
v. City of New London advanced all the way to the highest court in the
land.

Much of the blame rests on John M. Rowland. It was Governor Rowland and
his Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) that
committed tens of millions of state dollars to remaking ‹ i.e., mostly
eradicating ‹ a neighborhood of mainly working-class homes and small
businesses. Little consideration was given to homeowners like Susette
Kelo, who had turned a rundown cottage into a charming little home with
a view of the Thames.

The instrument Rowland chose was NLDC, a quasi-public organization that
had been dormant until he made it a powerful entity directed by
Connecticut College president Claire Gaudiani. Officially NLDC was an
agency for carrying out development projects chosen by city government.
But during the Rowland administration, it operated the other way
around. "Everything was done in Hartford and shipped down here, and we
were to authorize it," says former mayor Lloyd Beachy, the lone member
of City Council to vote against using eminent domain. Beachy says that
when he became mayor, he met with Rowland administration officials and
told them he hoped they would listen to the city's views. The response,
he says, was "This is the state's money, and we're going to spend it
anyway we please."

The city does bear some blame. The municipality conducted the public
process that culminated in the plan's approval by City Council. But the
deck was stacked. Fred Paxton, co-chair of the Coalition to Save the
Fort Trumbull Neighborhood, says, "The project was conceived in
Hartford and sold to/forced onto the city Œparents,' who were at once
star-struck by the governor and Claire Gaudiani and all the money
flowing into and from the project, and browbeaten by the DECD and the
NLDC, which told them they would lose $78 million of state funds if
they didn't fall in line." Indeed, remarkably, the city council wasn't
a signatory to the development agreement for the property.

Although NLDC has since cleared much of the 90 acres, the hotel and
conference center promised by NLDC have yet to be started. Office space
in a 90,000-square-foot research and office building left over from the
Naval Undersea Warfare Center stands vacant. Upscale housing that was
to be suitable for Pfizer employees has yet to begin construction.
Norquist says such disappointing results are common in economic
development projects that rely on the threat or use of eminent domain.
The "rigorous economic evaluation traditionally carried out by the
private sector" is eliminated in many undertakings carried out through
eminent domain, Norquist says. The result, he avers, is "many
ill-conceived, special interest projects."

The affront, in this case, is magnified by the vagueness of the plans
that NLDC announced for the properties of Kelo and a number of her
neighbors. At first their land was designated for "park support" for
the adjacent Fort Trumbull State Park. More recently it's been seen as
a possible site of a Coast Guard Museum.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the Kelo case in June.
Injustices would be less common if public agencies recognized the value
of modest, mixed-use neighborhoods as affordable places to live and
interesting parts of cities. Public authorities should have repaired a
sewage treatment plant on Fort Trumbull that for years spread a stench
over the neighborhood. Shamefully, the odor problem wasn't remedied
until Pfizer appeared on the horizon.

Attorneys for Kelo and the other protesting property owners argued that
the Supreme Court should prohibit use of eminent domain for "public
benefit" such as private economic development. Such an outright
prohibition might hamper worthwhile undertakings, such as the removal
of junkyards and oil tank farms from waterfronts. Certainly, however,
it is time to reconsider officialdom's love of big clear-and-rebuild
projects, the kind most likely to involve eminent domain. Often these
are anti-urban, undermining the traditional virtues of cities ‹
proximity, walkability, diversity, and the presence of buildings and
people spanning many decades.

Connecticut should reexamine the practice of delegating the power of
eminent domain to agencies not truly controlled by local elected
officials. "I argued that we [City Council] should retain eminent
domain power and should have to face the homeowner in the eye if we
take their house," says Beachy. He didn't prevail. But events have
proven him right.

Philip Langdon is senior editor of the national newsletter New Urban
News and a member of the Place Board of Contributors. He lives in New
Haven.