Eminent domain -- useful or counterproductive?
"Baltimore’s Flawed Renaissance: The Failure of Plan-Control-Subsidize Redevelopment" makes a case that "the city’s lack of progress on so many fronts is a direct by-product of its failure to understand and treat the real source of its problems: hostility to private property rights and a resulting flight of capital that largely drained the city of its economic lifeblood."
The report, written by Loyola College economics professor Stephen J.K. Walters and Loyola graduate Louis Miserendino, was produced as part of the Institute for Justice’s series on eminent domain abuse. (The institute is a libertarian public interest law firm.) The authors write:
Often, areas that were well-functioning (if unappealing to planners’ eyes) became emptied-out slums only after they were designated as part of a renewal area or were unlucky enough to sit in the path of a planner transit artery thought necessary to revitalize downtown.
Eminent domain has always been controversial, though it has seemed to have more supporters in the city than, say, a suburban community where a state or local agency was eying privately owned land. What do you think its effect has been on Baltimore?
Comments
I support property rights and lower taxes (and motherhood and apple pie). However, if city leaders (political and business) had not acted decisively in the 1950s -- after two decades of negligible investment in downtown -- Baltimore's decline would have been even more precipitous.
Assume for a moment that Baltimore's tax rate in the 1950s was comparable to the suburbs. Developers (and the investors supporting them) would still have opted for the suburbs because that location allowed them to purchase dozens of acres so they could plan and control their environment, build buildings with larger footprints, and provide free (or cheap) parking to their tenants and their customers.
Charles Center was an attempt to do the same thing in the city. But since investors wouldn't invest if their new property was going to be next to a crappy older one, it was important that one entity control the entire area. Which also allowed parking to be put underground with parks on top, rather than in unattractive parking garages.
That said, the era of these large scale eminent domain projects in Baltimore is coming to an end. Uplands in west Baltimore and the Superblock on the West Side will mark then end of that approach. And former councilman now Realtor Jody Landers and others are pressing for tax relief. In time, we'll get it, and will be able to put Dr. Walters thesis to the test.
Posted by: jamie hunt | June 30, 2008 1:41 PM