My guess is that they’re giving a nod to Kelo v. New London. It was a big supreme court case at the time (2005), when the city of New London tried to use eminent domain to buy up a big chunk of land and then sell it to a private developer. I don’t know the details of the case well, but my understanding is that it was a pretty typical case of “urban renewal”: government uses eminent domain to buy out a neighborhood full of poor people, kick the poor folks out, and then sells the land over to a private developer to build “higher-class” real estate.
A lot of people are politically opposed to this (for obvious reasons), so presumably the Charter Cities Institute decided to avoid getting entangled in that kind of thing.
My guess is that they’re giving a nod to Kelo v. New London. It was a big supreme court case at the time (2005), when the city of New London tried to use eminent domain to buy up a big chunk of land and then sell it to a private developer. I don’t know the details of the case well, but my understanding is that it was a pretty typical case of “urban renewal”: government uses eminent domain to buy out a neighborhood full of poor people, kick the poor folks out, and then sells the land over to a private developer to build “higher-class” real estate.
A lot of people are politically opposed to this (for obvious reasons), so presumably the Charter Cities Institute decided to avoid getting entangled in that kind of thing.