Ironically, the government wasn’t actually the real estate developer in this case. In fact, this was the point of the Kelo case; government has long had the power to take land for public use, and the case was about whether the government could act as something of a coercive coordinator for collecting land for private development.
Of course, had the case not taken several years to resolve, who knows what might have happened.
There are plenty of these anti-commons cases in real life, however; in my Law and Economics class we discussed a similar one in Russia, where nobody occupied the stores in a particular street because the requisite property rights were too difficult to collect, so everybody was forced into stalls right in front of the stores.
Ironically, the government wasn’t actually the real estate developer in this case. In fact, this was the point of the Kelo case; government has long had the power to take land for public use, and the case was about whether the government could act as something of a coercive coordinator for collecting land for private development.
Of course, had the case not taken several years to resolve, who knows what might have happened.
There are plenty of these anti-commons cases in real life, however; in my Law and Economics class we discussed a similar one in Russia, where nobody occupied the stores in a particular street because the requisite property rights were too difficult to collect, so everybody was forced into stalls right in front of the stores.