The lefties could not friggin believe that it was THEIR GUYS in the Supreme Court that thought it was a good idea.

This is because ...THEY...ARE...MORONS... who can't tell the difference between a peace/love/dope 1960's commune acid casualty and a died in the wool totalitarian leftist statist.

THIS is the dividing line between the normally harmless mushbrained "do gooders" and the very dangerous would be Lenins/Stalins.

The Lenins/Stalins play the do-gooders like a Steinway every time.

There is a key aspect missing to this story: Where is the money?

As part of eminent domain, the government seizing the property must compensate the owners. Now, if any of these people who are receiving eviction notices cashed any check from the NLDC in the last 5 years, then they no longer own that property. NLDC would have to cut checks to the owners before they can take possession of the properties. So where are those checks? Have they been cashed? Are they sitting in these people's in-basket as they await a final, final disposition? Or has NLDC not attempted to pay these people yet?

It probably doesn't matter, except if a home owner deposited their check, but it seems like it should be an important aspect to the story.

Where is the money?

They get low-balled. All eminent doman seizures result in a low-ball payout. They're going to pay you on the residential value not the commercial value.

Look, I'm against this ruling too but you have to understand that the property owners are not being lowballed. The government is required to pay Fair Market Value and where you have an entire taking of a residential property, FMV can be established quite easily thru comparison with other properties in the subject area that have sold recently.

The problem comes in when you have a partial taking with damages to the remainder because damages are difficult to estimate accurately. However, courts (especially where juries are involved) tend to overcompensate, probably because of government deep pockets and also because you don't have a willing seller.

Property taxes are proof we don't own our homes. We rent them from the government. This ruling just means they can break the lease if they find a tenant willing to pay higher rent.

ballyache, FMV is a joke when you take out the 'market'. The government doesn't assess what the market is, the parties involved in the transaction do.

And just because you want it badly doesn't mean I'm being unfair when I ask $1,000,000,000 for it. Apparently you don't want it badly enough to pay the price I feel compensates me for having to move. You are being unfair when you ask the government to force me out of my property at a price I was unwilling to accept.

Would I be an asshole for asking so much? Maybe, but being an asshole isn't illegal (if it were, there'd be plenty of empty seats in the senate).

It was recently reported that the city of New London is now seeking rent from the owners going back to 2000 when this whole thing got started. The city is paying them the fair market value as of 2000 not 2005. But charging rental fees assessed as of 2005.
So some of the people will end up paying the government more in back rent than the government is giving them for the property.

We shouldn't be too surprised that the Left supported this abomination. After all, taking property from A in order to give it to B is what Leftist government is all about. See above re: every single measure enacted or promoted by a Democrat in the last 70 years.

All the "we're out for the little guy" crap is just window dressing, grease for the skids. What they are really about is total top-down control over our economic lives.

I wonder if New London collected property taxes on those properties that were being "rented" between 2000 and 2004. And if so, will the taxes be refunded to the former owners? I don't know the answers, but my guesses would be "Yes" and "They should live so long".

Thank you, Sharp as a Marble, for bringing the FMV canard into stark relief. Another way of putting what you said is this: what happens to the market value of a product once the government says that no matter who purchases that product, the government is purchasing it next (don't worry! with just compensation - wink wink!) and handing it over to developers. Or to put it a third way, if the original owner of the property is receiving fair value for it, and not "fair value" for it, why can't the developer just buy straight from the original owner, instead of using the long arm of the law to get their hands on it?

It is impressive, in it's own way, that the left started using the courts to secure all of their favorite pet "rights" all the while ignoring the fact that in doing so they were depriving the rest of us of our right to self-government. Twits.

What goes around comes around.
Justice Souter may reap the harvest, himself:

http://blogidaho.blogspot.com/2005/08/lost-liberty-hotel.html

It ought to work like this: Home Depot approaches me to buy my 250k house for 250k. I turn them down--if I wanted to sell at market I would have already. They bump to 300k.

I, being a greedy capitalist and a pig too, decide I want 500K even though the crib isn't even close to worth it. I think Home Depot will pay it because they need the property. They tell me to go scratch, they'll build elsewhere.

Now, at some theoretical point in between, we should arrive at a number that allows me to share in the properties new commercial value. More than market for a home, less than for a Home Depot. Home Depot will only pay what they can afford to on a discounted cash flow basis.

Eminent domain allows Home Depot to gyp me out of my share of the properties new value. They'll claim the power of ED prevents one homeowner from holding up the deal asking for the moon while the others are hoping the deal goes through. I'm not buying.

FMV is a scam.

The owners should be paid based on what its value after the siezure will be.

If someone is forced to take $250K, then one nanosecond after the ink dries, the place is worth $500K (because that's what its commercial assesment is going to be when sold to developers) then they should have been paid $500K.

Ballyache is (mostly) right. The way this works (in most places; not sure about CT) is that the gov't negotiates a price with you and if you can't reach agreement, you take the dispute to a commission of freeholders (i.e., other regular citizens who own land in the area), and they arbitrate. The freeholders don't want to see you get screwed, because the same thing could happen to them, and also because a good price makes their land look more valuable (though it also pushes up their own property taxes at the next assessment). They can't go too overboard, though, because they'll get reversed on appeal to the courts -- the courts are fairly deferential, but they will reverse if the arbitrated value is way out of line. You only get residential value because you aren’t the one who’s doing the commercial development (that's only reasonable: a real free market developer won't pay you commercial value if you hold out for it, they'll just go build somewhere else -- afer all, the difference between residential and commercial value is where their own profit margin comes in).

The real screw job is this: it's going to cost you big attorney $$ to go through the commission and the courts, and the gov't knows this. The “government” here is actually an individual employee whose job it is to fix a price. That individual knows you’ll have to pay big attorney $$, and also believes (perhaps rightly) that he has an obligation to get this property at the lowest cost to the taxpayers. So his deal is this: “Look, you and I both know your property is worth $300K, but you’re going to have to pay $40K in (non-recoverable) attorney fees to get that, leaving you with a net of $360K. So I’ll be a sweetheart and offer you $275K.” He’s done his job properly, and you’d be smart to take it, but you’re still getting screwed.

In some states you get back your attorney $$ if you win, but you still run the risk of getting low-balled by the commission (who may have incentives of their own you don’t know about). So it’s also true that there’s no way this is a real free market deal.

But the main point is that the property has been taken specifically and only to benefit some property developer.

And the area is not blighted.

Any town with a decent size population has a town hall that is cozy with developers, and many towns are virtually infested with developer sock-puppets on the town council.

Its the continuing abuse of the term 'public use' that makes me want to throw up.

Its like words just don't mean anything anymore.

Sharp As A Marble

Sorry to be late in responding but I was out until now. FMV is not subjective (you may be able to offer anecdotal evidence to the contrary) but I'm speaking generally.

The governing body will have the property appraised by an independent appraiser. Of course since the government is paying him this alone could bring his independence into question.

But the property owner can also get an appraisal and this guy will also be influenced by whose paying him. Therefore there will be a variance between these two appraisals. Negotiations ensue. If, as I said before, it's an entire taking of a residential property the value is pretty well defined. If it's a partial taking with damages to the remainder, then the owner should hire a lawyer. There are lawyers who specialize in this type of law. There fee is based on the amount of the award . They earn their keep.

As I said at the beginning, the Kelo decision is terrible and is seen as such by an overwhelming majority of people. One wonders what the Supreme Court was thinking. But it's not a question of money. By and large, property owners do not get cheated in eminent domain cases.

ballyache, you're not grasping the essential concept -- in the ED context, FMV is a fiction.

FMV is predicated on the assumption that BOTH participants in the transaction are doing so voluntarily. That obviously does not exist in ED cases.

FMV is just a hypothetical number. It is based on historical figures, averages and other statistical information. It does not reflect the true value of the property to either the owner or the commercial developer who will receive it after the seizure.

Here's the key: the prospective commercial development CHANGES the value of the property. (We can assume that, in the cases where there is a dispute, it increases the property's value.) Therefore, the old historical averages are obsolete and inaccurate. We know this with 100% certainty.

Why should the benefits of this increased value accrue only to the new developer? Why should the property owner not benefit from the added value? After all, it's his property that is going to be put to this supposedly valuable commercial use.

LauraW, do you know if the CT state legislature is one of the states looking at revising its ED laws? I live in CT too, but I haven't read anything pointing in either direction.

There is nothing hypothetical about Fair Market Value. Talk to an appraiser (or an eminent domain lawyer). For the owner to get the value you suggest, he would have to develop the property.

You don't get paid potential commercial value for existing residential real estate. None of this is hypothetical or new in any way and none of it is a matter of opinion. It's a matter of established eminent domain law.

The only thing that's new is the ruling that private real estate can be taken not just for a public good, but for another private use that will generate more tax revenue.

When Kelo came down, there was much talk of Feds sanctioning towns who took homes, and of state legislatures enacting laws to protect the citizenry from the ruling in Kelo.
Has CT done anything?

CT is trying to schedule a special session to pass that stuff. The story here is that the developer's trying to kick off/collect "rent" from the property owners before any such laws can go through.

Yeah, I think they tried and failed to vote on this last year for some reason. Memory fuzzy.

State legislatures would do well to nip this in the bud ASAP, especially in blue states where even the liberals are outraged and the mantle of blame is crystal frickin' clear.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, surely the threat of being mugged by a commercial property developer can flip them too.