Stamford, Conn.
THE signs all over town herald Stamford as "The City That Works," a predictable enough bit of local boosterism with the added advantage of being mostly true - especially downtown, where Stamford's business district is by far the biggest success story in a state known for wealthy suburbs and distressed cities.
There are a lot of reasons Stamford has done so well, with about 15 million square feet of office space under rent, most notably the home of the giant UBS international investment bank lured from Manhattan. But one of them stands out: Since the 1960's the city has been using its power of eminent domain, mostly in the 130 acres in its southeast quadrant, to take private property, assemble developable megaparcels and eventually turn them into the glistening, somewhat antiseptic downtown business district that is doing so well today.
In the overheated petri dish of outrage that is American politics, there was something quite familiar about the calls for doing something, anything, immediately, yesterday, about the 5-4 Supreme Court decision last month that upheld the taking of private homes through eminent domain up Interstate 95 in New London. But as Connecticut legislators ponder calls for severe curbs on eminent domain, the experience in Stamford may say more about the issues than the overheated public debate.
So while you can find cases of eminent domain applied in questionable ways, with New London perhaps one of them, almost lost in the public fulminating is that for cities having to compete with the vast acres of suburban sprawl, eminent domain is often the one effective way they can do it.
The decision touched off the usual outrage over activist judges. Gov. M. Jodi Rell compared the "five robed justices" (it would be better if they disrobed?) to the king of England before the American Revolution. But skeptics say the ruling was the opposite of judicial activism, with the court declining to overturn state laws and local practices.
"This wasn't activist judges taking the laws into their own hands," said Mayor Dannel P. Malloy of Stamford. "But talk radio has turned this whole thing upside down."
NOT that there aren't important issues in New London, where 15 homeowners were holding out against a sprawling hotel and conference project to be built by a private developer, or elsewhere, like outside Syracuse where small business owners have fought to protect their businesses from being taken for the highly speculative DestiNY USA megaproject. At issue are cases of eminent domain not for roads or schools, but for private economic development projects promoted as having substantial public benefit.
But officials with Connecticut cities and towns say the ones most at risk in this dispute are not homeowners, facing the infinitesimal risk their homes might be taken for a competing use, but cities facing declining tax bases and competition from suburbs with large inventories of available dirt.
"You can't run an assembly line around some guy's porch. You can't have a building with six wings on it. Cities have to have some way to assemble rational pieces of land or there's no way they can compete with suburbs," said Michael W. Freimuth, Stamford's director of economic development.
Robert M. Ward, the Connecticut House minority leader, says it is not that simple, that private developers can assemble properties on their own without eminent domain, and that it is never appropriate to take property from one owner, be it homeowner or business, for another. And, he said, there is a practical as well as a moral issue: Too often projects turn out to be duds.
"More often than not the projects are failures," he said. "It's a fast, easy, lazy, unfair way of taking people's property."
But it would be hard to prove that in Stamford, where the biggest downside may be too much traffic and growth. Michael Lawlor, co-chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said there are many issues worth reviewing - whether there should be a requirement that eminent domain be limited to properties in "blighted areas," and how to make that determination, whether there should be different standards for residences than businesses, and what proper compensation levels are. But those questions are better dealt with in a deliberative fashion than a post-ruling panic, he said.
In Texas, for example, state senators rushed together a bill limiting eminent domain only to find, gasp, that it might apply to a proposed stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. Bowing to a recognition of what constitutes really important public uses, the proposed stadium was grandfathered in.