Susette Kelo dreamed of owning a home that looked out over the water. She purchased and lovingly restored her little pink house where the Thames River meets the Long Island Sound in 1997, and had enjoyed the great view from its windows. The Dery family, up the street from Susette, had lived in Fort Trumbull since 1895; Matt Dery and his family lived next door to his mother and father.  Matt’s mother was born in her house in 1918 and had never lived anywhere else.  The richness and vibrancy of this neighborhood reflected the American ideal of community and the dream of homeownership.

Tragically, the City of New London turned that dream into a nightmare.

In 1998, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer built a plant next to Fort Trumbull and the City determined that someone else could make better use of the land than the Fort Trumbull residents. The City handed over its power of eminent domain—the ability to take private property for public use—to the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), a private body, to take the entire neighborhood for private development. As the Fort Trumbull neighbors found out, when private entities wield government’s awesome power of eminent domain and can justify taking property with the nebulous claim of “economic development,” all homeowners are in trouble.

The Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London Decision Made It Much Easier to Abuse Eminent Domain 

The fight over Fort Trumbull eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. In one of the most controversial rulings in its history, the Court held that economic development was a “public use” under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

Now instead of a “public purpose,” condemnations would be upheld based on “expected public benefits.” If a property could potentially generate more tax dollars or create new jobs as something bigger and newer, then using eminent domain to replace the current owner with a glitzier development served the public good. Worse, the Supreme Court explicitly allowed seizing private property without requiring “‘a reasonable certainty’ that the expected public benefits will actually accrue.”  

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo meant that Susette Kelo, her neighbors, and every property-owning American faced the threat of losing their homes and businesses to a private developer under the guise of raising tax revenue and creating jobs.  

Emboldened, within just one year of the Kelo ruling, local governments threatened eminent domain or condemned nearly 5,800 homes, businesses, churches, and other private properties so they could be transferred to benefit another private party.  

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision against Kelo and her neighbors sparked a nation-wide backlash against eminent domain abuse, leading eight state supreme courts and 43 state legislatures to strengthen protections for property rights.  Moreover, Kelo educated the public about eminent domain abuse, and polls consistently show that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to Kelo and support efforts to change the law to better protect home and small business owners.  Moreover, since the Kelo ruling in June 2005, citizen activists have defeated 44 projects that sought to abuse eminent domain for private development.

  

Read More:

https://ij.org/case/kelo/

Little Pink House:
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Pink-House-Catherine-Keener/dp/B07FTMLL7K