Paving Paradise: Eminent Domain, Developers & The Fight for Property Rights
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Big yellow taxi and property rights. Yeah, big yellow taxi. Old Joni Mitchell song. You familiar with the lyrics? Pave paradise and put up a parking lot. I’ve seen this happen often. Like I said, am a, I’m not anti-growth by any stretch of the imagination. I just think things need to be done the right way. And one of the things I cannot stand,
is when you get various different developers in bed with politicians and this happens more often than not on the local level. yeah, we gotta take this and we gotta turn over this wetland and we gotta do, and I’ve seen this happen all over the country, seen it happen here in the state of Florida where I live now.
where oftentimes you’ll see areas and farmland being taken down, grazing land, and all of a sudden you’ve got some ugly ass apartment complex. Like I said it before, it looks like it was designed by the architecture firm of Excel and PowerPoint. Ugly! Ugly! Like something you’d see the Soviets put up.
yeah, it’s got some palm trees and maybe a pool in the middle and an area where you can play cornhole or something like that. But again, you could punch your hole through most of these walls. It’s just garbage and it’s owned by a lot of private equity. Now, soundly that, it’s also when the government gets involved and starts seizing property, eminent domain. And that goes back to something we talked about on the program.
This was going back to 2005. 2005, I railed against this and it was in Connecticut. It was the Supreme Court decision, Kelo, versus the city of New London there, where to this day, this day, the land was seized, seized by the government. I think it was for Pfizer. I can’t remember. The pharmaceutical company was supposed to put some plant there and they never did. And they never did. Well,
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I’m glad to see this. is a step in the right direction. Town in New Jersey, Cranberry, New Jersey, surrendered its attempt to seize through eminent domain a working farm. Like a working farm that has been owned by a family for generations.
yeah, the government and their infinite wisdom wanted to take and seize that property land because they wanted a developer to build 130 affordable housing units on the property.
Yeah, this is, this is government action. This is, again, do you ever own anything? Do you? The government can up files it, hand it over to a developer, seize private land and hand it over to a developer. Not very American, if you ask me. This six months ago, the township announced that a plan to take legal action to seize the farm because
Again, the Jersey Supreme Court’s 1975 Mount Laurel Doctrine, which requires New Jersey towns to build low rent housing.
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I mean how stupid of a this you require a town to build low rent housing so cranberry needed to create 265 units over the next 10 years So the farm was a beast piece of land that was open was farming that was there Hey, we’re just gonna go ahead. We’re gonna take that now That was a case of eminent domain, but you’re seeing it happen all over and I’m you know all over the country where? Ken
Government officials, government officials and yeah, it’s Republicans, yeah, it’s Democrats getting in bed with developers and look at all the property tax revenue we’re gonna be able to generate for your town. Right, it’s actually interesting, we have a stock commercial for a gentleman, I gotta look look who his name up, because I saw it briefly, didn’t get his name, I the commercial, he’s running for the head of the agriculture department here.
In the state of Florida. It’s a big position and uh, he points out that he’s just putting a stop to this nonsense It’s a farmer. He’s he’s basically just keep Florida rural Again, he doesn’t want the farmland knocked down. I know you don’t want the the ranch land taken away and he’s not wrong He’s not Wrong, you know, like I said, all for development. I don’t have any problem You you want to put some more units up in the city? You want to revitalize various different areas, right? But again you uh
Joni was onto something. You don’t wanna have to pay paradise and put up a parking lot. WatchStalkinWallStreet.com.
