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A person's home is the government's parcel

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published July 3, 2005

TALLAHASSEE - The weekend our dog died, a woman came uninvited to our home in St. Petersburg with an offer she assumed we could not refuse. The house wasn't for sale but she proposed to buy it.

She was a real estate broker who drove a Rolls-Royce and wore gold bracelets from her wrist to her elbow.

Her anonymous client, we were told, was a friend of Gary Sheffield's. He wanted to buy and tear down all the houses on our block so that he could build one next door to Sheffield's egregious monument to bad taste. The "offer," which she treated more like a command, was contingent on agreement by all the owners.

We explained politely that we did not need to sell and that it was a dreadful time to be discussing any business, but she insisted on showing a written offer she had already prepared.

It was an insult. It was arrogance. It was a slap in the face. Plainly calculated only on the property appraiser's assessment of market value, which assumes a willing seller, it allowed nothing for moving costs, the thousands of dollars in other nonrecoverable expenses, or the inconvenience and stress of changing residences. She was proposing that we take a loss for the sake of some grossly overpaid athlete or entertainer who could easily afford to make it worth our while..

We should have thrown her out. Instead, we agreed to make a counteroffer. The broker who sold us our house suggested $300,000, which would have turned a nice profit, but Ms. Rolls-Royce was horrified.

"That's not a serious offer," she said.

"Neither was yours," I said.

She said she would make another, but that was the last time we talked.

Soon after, she mailed a round-robin letter summarizing the state of negotiations for "these parcels."

I wrote her that "parcel" was a hell of a way to talk about someone's home. Some of our neighbors must have felt the same way, because nothing more ever came of it.

All that outrage came to mind when I read that by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court allowed the city of New London to take perfectly good homes from unwilling owners so that the "parcels" - that word again - could be put to private use that would generate more tax revenue and other economic benefits for the public.

It is not a slum deserving of clearance. No sports stadium, highway, school or other public use is contemplated. Stripped of the details, the New London scheme is about trashing some citizens for the sake of others. One of the nine unwilling sellers is being kicked out of the home where she was born 87 years ago. Another is her son whose home next door was a wedding present. No "just compensation," as the law refers to it, is fair compensation for treating people like that.

Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent was eloquent proof of why the wrong justice is retiring. Once again, she took a responsible middle ground between a court faction that was too indulgent of governmental discretion and the extremism of Clarence Thomas, who argued that existing public-taking precedents should be overturned.

The swing vote, unfortunately, went the wrong way this time. It was that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote separately to rationalize that Kelo vs. New London is not a precedent for other cases "in which the transfers are so suspicious, or the procedures employed so prone to abuse, or the purported benefits are so trivial or implausible, that courts should presume an impermissible private purpose . . ."

In other words, it would be like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: the courts would know it when they see it.

Trouble is, they should have seen it in New London. Now, says O'Connor, "the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

Someone promptly filed a proposal to build a hotel on Justice David Souter's homestead in New Hampshire. It was a publicity stunt, to be sure, but it made the point. The hotel would pay higher taxes, just as Sheffield's erstwhile neighbor would have.

Bad cases make bad law. This terribly bad case is priming Congress and the legislatures to go too far the other way. If only Kennedy could have followed O'Connor's lead one last time.

But as to which extreme would be worse, consider this:

How many city councils do you suppose have the guts to say "No" to Wal-Mart?

Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is dyckman@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 2, 2005, 09:39:04]