Only a small proportion of these takings are done under urban renewal programs. The federal clearance programs which displaced millions of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s are no longer in effect. But on the state level, urban renewal is still very much alive.

There are nearly 100 urban renewal zones in Massachusetts today, including active programs in Somerville and Chelsea, and River’s Edge—formerly Telecom City— in Malden, Medford, and Everett.

In Cambridge, North Point is not an urban renewal zone, but is being developed along similar lines.

Four tenement buildings, three houses, and many businesses in Central Square were evicted and demolished 40 years ago to make way for Central Plaza and its big parking lots. CharlesBank, newly chartered by politically connected families, then moved into the building’s prime corner.

To make room for the Central Plaza building and its two big parking lots, two blocks of small business storefronts, four tenement houses, and three private homes were taken by eminent domain and demolished.

photo: Lorenzo Lazar

Eminent domain proceedings may also be used to transfer property quickly to avoid public process. Last spring, the Cambridge city council voted unanimously to pay $29.5 million for a site in East Cambridge, three times what the politically connected developer had invested in it. A new police station will be located there, dubbed Fort Healy because it will be named after city manager Bob Healy.

Fort Healy is the new location for Cambridge Police HQ. Why was the proprty taken by eminent domain? Because it is a quick process which prevents the public asking embarrassing questions such as: Why did the City pay $29.5 million to connected developers who spent less than 1/3 of that amount on the property? Why is the City moving the Police HQ to an uninhabited area of East Cambridge when most citizens want it to remain in Central Square?

photo: Lorenzo Lazar

Business—as usual

Though some see in Kelo v. City of New London an expansion of eminent domain powers, the real story is that, as law professor Eugene Volokh told the Boston Globe, “it's not much of a change.”

There had been speculation that conservatives on the Court would use the case act to narrow the scope for state seizure of private property. It didn’t happen.

“Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government,” declared the Court; and there was no “principled way of distinguishing economic development from other public purposes.”

Justice Stevens’ majority opinion emphasized that individual states could still decide to restrict their own eminent domain powers. State legislators around the country hastened to sponsor bills that would at least appear to do just that.

Thus on June 12, the Massachusetts House resolved against taking “property… for private economic development unless the property is a blighted area.”

House minority leader Bradley Jones (R, North Reading) and Rep. Thomas Stanley (D, Waltham) have thrown a number of anti-eminent-domain bills into the legislative hopper.

Municipal lobbyists oppose these bills. But the Jones and Stanley bills are nothing for them to get excited about.

Jones and Stanley’s bills provide that, when your property is taken, the eventual private beneficiary can not be named. This has already been law for a couple of centuries, and doesn’t prevent some rich bastard from owning your land. But one can never restate a good principle too often.

Jones and Stanley will also require that your property be designated as “blighted” before it can be taken by eminent domain. Before you start cheering however, ask your attorney about the legal definition of “blight.”

Blight in the eyes of the beholder

Harvard professor Robert Fogelson tells us that in 1912, Boston architect J. Randolph Coolidge defined “blighted districts” as areas “in which land values after a period of increase are stationary or falling….” The authoritative Presidential housing conference of 1930 distinguished blight, “an economic liability” from the slum, “a social liability.”

This economic definition of blight came to be used under Urban Renewal and it is still used.

In the 1950s and 1960s, eminent domain was used to displace millions of Americans for urban renewal and highway projects, in nearly every major center of low income and minority people. Cambridge’s planners wanted to evict thousands of residents in Riverside, Wellington-Harrington, Area Four, Cambridgeport, and North Cambridge. A vast industrial zone around Kendall Square was actually cleared.

The rationale was both social and fiscal. As Christopher Jencks, then a Harvard student, wrote in the Crimson: “The University today is in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals… .At the moment, the cannibals are in the form of the Boston metropolitan area… The fully matured product is visible in a slum-surrounded university like Columbia or Chicago.… Harvard cannot be fitted to a slum community, and Harvard cannot move.… The only alternative is to develop a new pattern through urban renewal.”

For “Slum clearance” read “ethnic cleansing.”

Urban renewal today

In 2003, as the eminent domain powers of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) were due to expire, there was a lot of talk about restricting its powers —if not abolishing it altogether. Urban Renewal areas covered well over 10 percent of the city, and even outside those areas, the BRA could exempt properties from zoning and property taxes, simply by declaring them “blighted.” Yet when it came to the Boston city council vote, the BRA survived with its powers intact.

On September 19, in the Connecticut city where the Supreme Court Kelo case originated, New London Greens called a rally at City Hall. Green city council candidate Bob Stuller demanded that the city council “halt eviction proceedings against Fort Trumbull homeowners and tenants,” cut its ties to the urban renewal Commission, scrap the Development Plan and reclaim their own municipal authority. The city council had the chamber cleared and went into executive session.

As often happens with land-use issues, the politics of eminent domain are not of the usual Left-and-Right type. Office holders of every hue find these powers too useful to refuse.

On the other hand, few people enjoy being bulldozed out of their homes, land and businesses by bureaucrats on behalf of corporate interests.

Indeed, the dissents in Kelo came from the conservative end of the Supreme Court. O’Connor wrote that eminent domain’s “beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.” Thomas said that the political process “guarantees that the losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities.”

Don’t pin your hopes on the Republican Party, though.

Recently, Republican stalwart Elizabeth Harmer-Dionne denounced the Kelo decision in a Cambridge Chronicle op-ed. She recalled the demolition of Boston’s West End the 1950s and 1960s, but forgot to mention that the urban renewal program was most developed under the Eisenhower administration.

The West End project itself was the gift of Boston’s Democrat pols to the Rappaports, a family prominent in Republican circles to this day.

Harmer-Dionne did not criticize the use of eminent domain in the $29 million sweetheart deal for the new police station site in East Cambridge.

Even the most confirmed libertarians can be tempted by the lure of quick results promised by eminent domain. In 1997, during the Save Central Square episode, a retired professor and self-proclaimed anarchist urged the City to take the Holmes building away from the developer by eminent domain. The city could then construct a “civic center” there instead.

Mystic Docks is part of the area slated for urban renewal in Somerville. Since the City decided to redevelop East Somerville, developers have taken tens of millions of dollars in profit, not by building anything, but by speculating on the changing valuation of the land. The Mystic View Task Force points out that these profits were possible only because of decisions taken by the Board of Aldermen.

photo: Lawrence Prift

More on eminent domain in the next issue of The Bridge. Who and what is being displaced today? Alternative ways to live on the land.