If you are a plaintiff, you may rightly predict that if an opinion begins with the words, “[r]oughly two decades ago…” there’s a good chance you aren’t going to like the outcome. Courts tend to not like cases that are based on facts that occured 20+ years ago, after all.
But that’s how the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Poppleton Now Community Ass’n LLC v. La Cite Development, LLC, No. 25-1770 (May 4, 2026) begins. Yet perhaps surprisingly, the court’s ruling against the plaintiffs is not based on the statute of limitations or some other defense keyed to the passage of time. Or any other procedural defense. Indeed, the court reversed district court’s judgment which had dismissed the complaint because the plaintiffs lacked standing.
But the day still ended in a loss for the plaintiffs, when the court nonetheless dismissed their complaint for failure to state a takings claim. The court concluded the plaintiffs lacked a private property interest, an essential element of any takings claim.
The complaint challenged Baltimore’s failed attempt to redevelop land in the city’s Poppleton neighborhood, which didn’t result in the promised revitalization, only a “vacant and neglected” lot next to the unfortunate property owner plaintiffs.
Since 1975 (yes, fifty years ago!) the neighborhood has been designated as an urban renewal area. In 2006, the city and a private developer entered into one of those typical redevelopment agreements whereby the developer would build more than 500 homes, while the city would help out with its eminent domain power if needed.
“But the redevelopment project soon became mired in delays and complications,” slip op. at 4 (surprise, surprise), and in 2013, the agreement was amended multiple times. But even that didn’t get thing right (surprise, surprise), and “little progress was made.” Id. Indeed, “only a single apartment complex had been completed, and the project area still contained hundreds of vacant plots of land. The plaintiffs describe the site as largely abandoned and overrun by weeds, rats, trash, and other environmental nuisances.” Slip op. at 4-5.
Several area owners who have to live with this sued the redeveloper and the city in federal court. The first claim was that the use of eminent domain to take neighboring property was a taking lacking a public use. The second was a state-law nuisance claim. The district court dismissed the public use claim for lack of standing (any such claim belongs to the owner whose property was taken, not neighbors who must live with the fallout). The court dismissed the nuisance claim as well, concluding that the complaint failed to state a Maryland law claim because “the plaintiffs offered only conclusory allegations that their use and enjoyment of their property had been impacted.” Slip op. at 8.
The Fourth Circuit reversed the dismissal of the public use claim. The plaintiffs asserted “that property they own has diminished in value as a result of the [development agreement] and the related use of eminent domain[,]” slip op. at 9, this is not enough to show a personal stake in a takings claim. These are the types of harm and loss of property value that usually show a plaintiff’s standing, and the redressability component was also satisfied. The district court should not have dismissed for lack of standing. See slip op. at 11. Things seemed to be looking up for the plaintiffs.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the court’s analysis. It held that because the plaintiffs did not own the property which the complaint alleged was taken by the city back in the day, the complaint failed to state a claim:
That the plaintiffs have standing to bring their takings claim, however, does not mean they can succeed on the merits of that claim. Again, as the district court correctly identified, the individual plaintiffs “all maintain ownership over their properties and . . . do not contend that any of their properties have been taken,” either physically or by regulation. Poppleton Now, 2025 WL 1707254, at *8. 6 This fact does not preclude the plaintiffs from establishing standing, as we have explained. But it does prevent them from succeeding on the merits. As our precedents make clear, the Takings Clause does not provide the plaintiffs with a mechanism to challenge the taking of their former neighbors’ properties because holding a protected property interest in taken property is an essential element of any takings claim.
Slip op. at 11-12.
Here, the plaintiffs do not assert any private property right “in anything taken by the government.” Slip op. at 13. Possession or ownership of private property “is an essential elements of a takings claim.” Id. No property, no takings claim.
We view this as a close cousin of the standing argument: your property wasn’t wrongfully taken, so you were not injured by the city’s (allegedly) illegal taking. If you suffered any wrong, it is because the city has let the property it took (from someone else) fall to seed, which has resulted in you having to live with the deleterious effects of the city’s failure to maintain. To us, that sounds more like a nuisance claim.
Thus, the complaint also asserted a state law nuisance claim, which the district court had dismissed for failing to plausibly plead such a claim. The Fourth Circuit disagreed, and vacated the dismissal. Again, things were looking up for the plaintiffs.
But again, it was not to be. The court remanded to the district court, instructing it to dismiss the state law claim without prejudice. With the court dismissing the federal claims, the district court must decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the one remaining state law claim:
All the plaintiffs’ federal claims were dismissed when this litigation was still in its “early stages” – at the motion-to-dismiss stage – and no discovery had yet occurred. See Henderson, 102 F.4th at 251. Moreover, the issues in this case implicate particularly strong state interests, and there is no substantial caselaw applying Maryland private nuisance law to claims analogous to this one. See United Mine Workers of Am. v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715, 726 (1966) (explaining that one reason not to exercise supplemental jurisdiction is to avoid “[n]eedless decisions of state law”).
Slip op. at 15.
So again, plaintiffs were out of luck.
We suppose the one ray of possible sunshine in all of this is that the dismissal will be without prejudice, leaving the plaintiffs here with the ability to file their Maryland law nuisance claim in a Maryland court. Provided, of course, that the 20-year-plus story doesn’t come back in a statute of limitations issue there.
Poppleton Now Community Ass’n, Inc. v. La Cite Development, LLC, No. 25-1770 (4th Cir. May 4, 2026)