Over and Over the Government Collective Visions Fails and leaves a Wake of Abandoned Wreckage - ‘Kelo’ Revisited

When will we ever learn that these politicians don't know anything except their own self-serving interests? Redevelopment helps them, their friends, their cronies, their egos. It does little or nothing to help those it ostensibly states it is going to help. More times than not, it leave things worse. The planing, the planed developments, the specific class and type of structures, right down to the replication in age and income demographics with all the same amenities are rolled out as a rolling blueprint of economic disaster across the country. Eminent domain is now a synonym  for eminent disaster. m/r

‘Kelo’ Revisited | The Weekly Standard

FEB 10, 2014, VOL. 19, NO. 21 • BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

Properties were seized and a neighborhood razed in the name of ‘economic development’ that never came

New London, Conn. 
"See that pole with the transformer hanging from it?” Michael Cristofaro asked me. “That was where my family’s home was.”

I looked up at a line of high telephone poles marching diagonally against a blanched winter sky across a vast, empty field​—​90 acres​—​that was entirely uninhabited and looked as though it had always been that way. New London, population 27,000, a rundown onetime whaling port on the Atlantic coast that never recovered after the whaling industry died at the end of the 19th century, is a desolate-looking city. Cristofaro, a 52-year-old New London-born computer network engineer, and I were in its most desolate neighborhood​—​actually, ex-neighborhood, for there was not a residential property left standing on the entire tract. Just below us lay the mouth of Connecticut’s Thames River (unlike in London, “Thames” rhymes with “James,” and the “th” is pronounced as in “thumb”) where it joins the northerly end of the Long Island Sound. An icy New England January wind​—​cold enough to freeze the ink in my ballpoint pen into a gray, spidery scrawl as I scribbled notes​—​ripped across the only signs of life, actually former life, on the deserted incline: waist-high dead weeds, probably the remains of the goldenrod, yarrow, pokeweed, and high grass that grow everywhere during warm months on the North Atlantic coast.

Cristofaro and I were walking through a section of New London called Fort Trumbull, a fist-shaped peninsula jutting out into the Thames. It is the battleground of what must be the most universally loathed Supreme Court ruling of the new millennium, Kelo v. City of New London (2005). The case is named after its lead plaintiff, Susette Kelo, a nurse who had owned a home a few blocks away from the Cristofaro house. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to uphold a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling that the city of New London and a nonprofit quasi-public entity that the city had set up, then called the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), were entitled to seize, in a process known as eminent domain, the homes and businesses of Kelo, the Cristofaros, and five other nearby property owners in the name of “economic development” that would generate “new jobs and increased revenue,” in the words of since-retired Justice John Paul Stevens, author of the majority opinion.

-please read the rest at link-