After the New York Court of Appeals' decisions in the Goldstein (Atlantic Yards) and Kaur (Columbia) cases, we opined that there were not many limits remaining on the government's exercise of eminent domain in that state.
But even after those cases, there's got to be some limits, no?
Our Owners' Counsel of America colleague Michael Rikon is currently testing that hypothesis in a case arising from Willets Point, a Queens neighborhood adjacent to Citi Field (new home of the Mets). Mike represents property owners (mostly small businesses) in the case, their public use challenge to the City of New York's attempt to take their Willets Point properties for "redevelopment." For more, see Willets Point United, and this video.
The problem is, the city doesn't have a redevelopment plan, or any plan regarding what it intends to do with the land beyond making it a "lively, mixed-use, sustainable community and regional destination." Talk about rainbows and unicorns. Seriously, that description sounds like a computer-generated list of trendy planning buzzwords, and the property owners have rightly asked how can a taking of property be "for public use" if the city itself can't say what "use" it plans to make of the property?
The case is now in the Appellate Division (remember, this is New York, where eminent domain challenges are instituted in the appeals court), and the Property Rights Foundation of America filed this amicus brief in support of the Willets Point owners. Read it for a quick summary of the case and the issues:
In particular, this Court can and should hold that the government may not take property for the asserted public purpose of urban redevelopment, where there is no specific development plan identified at the time of the taking; where the government's conceded failure to provide infrastructure and ordinary municipal services is a principal contributing factor to the alleged "blight'; and where financial, environmental, legal, and practical obstacles make it highly and unreasonably speculative that the purported public purpose will ever be achieved. PRFA's principal contention in this amicus brief is that notwithstanding past decisions by both federal and New York courts by which this Court is constrained, there remains an important role for courts to play in articulating and policing boundaries on the use of eminent domain.
Br. at 4.
Brief of Amicus Curiae The Property Rights Foundation of America, Inc. In re Serrone (Willets Point), No. 2...
