A new twist on the eminent domain controversy: Stamford, Connecticut, and no doubt other cities, has perfected a technique for stealing private property.
To paraphrase Shakespeare’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a bit of legal sophistry? A taking by any other name would smell as rotten.”
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Stamford, Connecticut, is one of the few cities in which urban renewal actually worked. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, New York City fell apart in all essential aspects under a series of feckless, welfare-state socialist mayors, including the matinee idol, liberal Republican John V. Lindsay. Stamford, by chance, was well along in the process of demolishing its downtown and building new office buildings. Figuratively speaking, it caught a giant wave and surfed all the way home. Seemingly overnight, Stamford became headquarters for an impressive array of major corporations as they fled the Manhattan cesspool.
In the ensuing years, however, shrewd politicians became aware of a way to acquire property on the cheap via eminent domain: announce the city’s intention to condemn the property, long before condemnation has been authorized and money appropriated. The effect is to hammer down the market value of a property to a fraction of its value before the announcement, so that, some years later, the city can take the property at the lower price, effectively stealing the difference from the property owner.
Once a property has been publicly identified as a target for condemnation at an unknown future date, desirable tenants, who usually want the stability of long-term occupancy, will be reluctant to sign leases, and mortgage lenders will be reluctant to renew mortgages. Over the years, such properties’ rent rolls diminish, as less desirable tenants become the only ones willing to rent. Owners are reluctant to make needed repairs or to invest money in upgrades of things like electrical, heating, and A/C systems.
A decade or more later, when the city actually takes the property, it is a shell of what it was before the announcement of intent.
The latest example of the genre was chronicled in today’s Stamford Advocate.
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Czesciks want more for their land; city calls payment fair
By Joy L. Woodson
Staff Writer
August 18, 2005
STAMFORD—A well-known city family says a city commission greatly devalued their land for decades by threatening to condemn it for a new road that wasn’t built.
The South End road project now has started, and the city has condemned the Czescik family’s land, but they want compensation for the decades that a cloud of condemnation hung over the four parcels.
The Czesciks, a family known for housing and civic leadership in the 1970s and 1980s, believe the city and the Urban Redevelopment Commission effectively condemned the four parcels nearly two decades ago by announcing that they would one day be taken for a road, said Frank Baker, a spokesman for the family who is also an attorney. The Urban Transitway, a $49 million six-lane thoroughfare in the South End, is expected to be completed in 2008.
The property owners are attempting to show the city impeded future growth on the sites through what is known as a regulatory taking or “inverse condemnation.”
Baker said the city should not benefit “if in fact a government impairs the value of a property at one point in time and then many years later says that it’s going to pay you for the impaired value that they caused.” It amounts to a “de facto taking,” he said.
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