It has been three years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of state property seizures by eminent domain for the purpose of economic development in a case that has come to be known as Kelo. Since then, takings have increased, which is no surprise. We are not talking, here, about government doing things for the greater good -- highways, power right-of-ways, etc. – but the kind of development schemes that result in office parks, malls, condos, and so forth. These, you see, would bring increased tax revenues for which government has an insatiable appetite.
So, how is that working out? Well, interestingly, the property that was at issue in the court case
... is now barren, because the townhouses that the city-sponsored developer was supposed to build there have never gone up. Interest in the area isn’t very great and the developer hasn’t been able to get financing. In fact, what began more than a decade ago as an extravagant ‘public-private’ scheme to redevelop this whole area around tourism, research and development and luxury residential uses has produced little except ongoing construction on a $17 million Coast Guard station.
Governments are reliably bad at picking winners. This is a lesson we seem to never to learn but which we might want to try to keep in mind as we are assured that government will find and fund the new technologies that will "break our addiction to oil."
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