In dissenting from the US Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision upholding the use of eminent domain for private-to-private transfers of property, Justices O’Connor and Thomas asserted, based on the history of urban renewal, that eminent domain for private development would disproportionately hurt poor and minority communities. This study uses US census data and a sample of redevelopment project areas using or identified for the use of eminent domain to test the assertions of Justices O’Connor and Thomas. Results reveal that such project areas are, in fact, disproportionately populated by those who are poor, minority and less educated.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Anderson, E. ( 1990) Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
2.
Armstrong-Stassen, M. ( 1994) Coping with transition: a study of layoff survivors, Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(7), pp. 597-621.
3.
Armstrong-Stassen, M. ( 2005) Coping with downsizing: a comparison of executive-level and middle managers, International Journal of Stress Management , 12(2), pp. 117-141.
4.
Bassett, K. ( 1993) Urban cultural strategies and urban regeneration: a case study and critique, Environmental Planning A, 25(12), pp. 1773-1788.
5.
Beauregard, R.A. ( 1985) Politics, ideology, and theories of gentrification, Journal of Urban Affairs, 7(4), pp. 51-62.
6.
Berliner, D. ( 2003) Public power, private gain. Institute for Justice, Arlington, VA.
7.
Berliner, D. ( 2006) Opening the floodgates. Institute for Justice, Arlington, VA.
8.
Berliner, D. (forthcoming) Public power, private gain II. Institute for Justice, Arlington, VA.
9.
Bostic, R.W. and Martin, R.W. ( 2003) Black home-owners as a gentrifying force? Neighbourhood dynamics in the context of minority home-ownership, Urban Studies, 40(12), pp. 2427-2449.
10.
Boyer, M.C. ( 1986) Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
11.
Brigham, A. ( 2006) Law stops ‘reverse Robin Hoods’, Tampa Tribune, 19 June, p. 15.
12.
Bullock, S. ( 2004) Narrow ‘public use’, New Jersey Law Journal, npn.
13.
Cicin-Sain, B. ( 1980) The costs and benefits of neighborhood revitalization , in: D. Rosenthal (Ed.) Urban Revitalization, pp. 49-75. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
14.
Danzinger, S. and Gottschaik, P. ( 1987) Earnings inequality, the spatial concentration of poverty, and the underclass, American Economic Review, 77, pp. 211-215.
15.
Dluhy, M., Revell, K. and Wong, S. ( 2002) Creating a positive future for a minority community: transportation and urban renewal politics in Miami, Journal of Urban Affairs , 24(1), pp. 75-95.
16.
Downs, A. ( 1981) Neighborhoods and Urban Development. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
17.
Dreher, R.G. and Echeverria, J.D. ( 2006) Kelo’s unanswered questions: the policy debate over the use of eminent domain for economic development. Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute, Washington, DC.
18.
Echeverria, J.D. (2005) Testimony of John D. Echeverria (http://www.law.georgetown.edu/gelpi/current_research/documents/GELPITestimony_KeloNYSNov05.pdf; accessed 2 June 2008).
19.
Freeman, L. ( 2005) Displacement or succession? Residential mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods, Urban Affairs Review, 40(4), pp. 463-491.
20.
Freeman, L. and Braconi, F. ( 2002) Gentrification and displacement, The Urban Prospect, 8(1), pp. 1-4.
21.
Freeman, L. and Braconi, F. ( 2004) Gentrification and displacement: New York City in the 1990s, Journal of the American Planning Association, 70(1), pp. 39-52.
22.
Frieden, B.J. and Sagalyn, L.B. ( 1989) Downtown Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
23.
Friedland, R. ( 1982) Power and Crisis in the City. London : Macmillan.
24.
Fullilove, M.T. ( 2005) Root Shock: How Tearing up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We can do about It. Oxford: One World/ Ballantine.
25.
Fullilove, M.T. ( 2007) Eminent domain and African Americans. Institute for Justice, Arlington, VA.
26.
Gans, H.J. ( 1962) The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans . New York: Free Press.
27.
Gelfand, M.I. ( 1975) A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965. New York: Oxford University Press.
28.
Goetz, E.G. ( 2000) The politics of poverty deconcentration and housing demolition , Journal of Urban Affairs, 22(2), pp. 157-174.
29.
Goodman, M.D. and Monti, D.J. ( 1999) Corporate sponsored redevelopment campaigns and the social stability of urban neighborhoods: St. Louis revisited, Journal of Urban Affairs, 21(1), pp. 101-128.
30.
Gotham, K.F. ( 2001) City without slums: urban renewal, public housing, and downtown revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 60(1), pp. 285-316.
31.
Hackworth, J. and Smith, N. ( 2001) The changing state of gentrification, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 92(4), pp. 464-477.
32.
Hannigan, J. ( 1998) Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis . New York: Routledge.
33.
Hartman, C. ( 1979) Comment on neighborhood revitalization and displacement: a review of the evidence, Journal of the American Planning Association, 45(4), pp. 488-492.
34.
Hines, T. ( 1982) Housing, baseball, and creeping socialism: the battle of Chavez Ravine, Los Angeles, 1949-1959, Journal of Urban History, 8(12), pp. 123-144.
35.
Hirsch, A.R. ( 1983) Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36.
Jackson, B., Kubzansky, L.D. and Wright, R.J. ( 2006) Linking perceived unfairness to physical health: the perceived unfairness model, Review of General Psychology, 10(1), pp. 21-40.
37.
Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Jargowsky, P. A. (1996) Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
38.
Jargowsky, P.A. ( 2003) Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
39.
Judd, D. and Fainstein, S. ( 1999) The Tourist City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
40.
Kearns, G. and Philo, C. (Eds) (1993) Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present. Oxford: Pergamon.
41.
Keating, L. ( 2000) Redeveloping public housing: relearning urban renewal’s immutable lessons, Journal of the American Planning Association , 66(4), pp. 384-397.
42.
Kleniewski, N. ( 1984) From industrial to corporate city: the role of urban renewal , in: W. K. Tabb and L. Sawyers (Eds) Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, pp. 205-222. New York: Oxford University Press.
43.
Kmiec, D.W. ( 2007) Hitting home: the Supreme Court earns public notice opining on public use, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, 9, pp. 501-543.
44.
Kotlyarevskaya, O.V. ( 2006) Public use requirement in eminent domain cases based on slum clearance, elimination of urban blight, and economic development, Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal, 5, pp. 197-231.
45.
Kraus, N. ( 2004) The significance of race in urban politics: the limitations of regime theory, Race and Society, 7(2), pp. 95-111.
46.
Krishnamurthy, M. ( 2005) Lake Zurich to get a look at redevelopment plans, Chicago Daily Herald, 3 June, p. 3.
47.
Lang, M. (1982) Gentrification Amid Urban Decline. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
48.
Lees, L. ( 2003) The ambivalence of diversity and the politics of urban renaissance: the case of youth in downtown Portland, Maine, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(3), pp. 613-634.
49.
Levene, H. ( 1960) Robust tests for equality of variances, in: I. Olkin, S. G. Ghurye , W. Hoeffding et al. (Eds) Contributions to Probability and Statistics: Essays in Honor of Harold Hotelling , pp. 278-292. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
50.
London, B., Lee, B.A. and Lipton, S.G. ( 1986) The determinants of gentrification in the United States: a city-level analysis, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 21(3), pp. 369-387.
51.
Marcuse, P. ( 1986) Abandonment, gentrification, and displacement: the linkages in New York City, in: N. Smith and P. Williams (Eds) Gentrification of the City , pp. 153-177. London: Allen & Unwin.
52.
Maskovsky, J. ( 2006) Governing the ‘new hometowns’: race, power, and neighborhood participation in the new inner city, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 13, pp. 73-99.
53.
Massey, D.S. and Denton, N.A. ( 1987) Trends in the residential segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians: 1970-1980, American Sociological Review, 52(6), pp. 802-825.
54.
Massey, D.S. and Denton, N.A. ( 1988) Sub-urbanization and segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas, American Journal of Sociology, 94(3), pp. 592-626.
55.
Massey, D.S. and Denton, N.A. ( 1993) American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
56.
McCubbin, M. ( 2001) Pathways to health, illness and well-being: from the perspective of power and control, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 11, pp. 75-81.
57.
Mushkatel, A. and Nakhleh, K. ( 1978) Eminent domain: land-use planning and the powerless in the United States and Israel, Social Problems, 26(2), pp. 147-159.
58.
Newman, K. and Wyly, E.K. ( 2006) The right to stay put, revisited: gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City, Urban Studies, 43(1), pp. 23-57.
59.
O’Connor, S. D. (2005) Susette Kelo, et al., Petitioners v. City of New London, Connecticut, et al.; Justice O’Connor Dissenting. United States Supreme Court, Washington, DC.
60.
Palen, J. and London, B. (Eds) (1984) Gentrification, Displacement, and Neighborhood Revitalization. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
61.
Palen, J. and Nachmias, C. ( 1984) Revitalization in a working-class neighborhood, in: J. Palen and B. London (Eds) Gentrification, Displacement, and Neighborhood Revitalization, pp. 128-139. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
62.
Peterson, B. ( 2005) Written testimony of the Honorable Bart Peterson, Mayor, Indianapolis, Indiana on behalf of the National League of Cities before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution on oversight of the Kelo Decision and potential congressional responses ( http://www.nlc.org/ASSETS/9A7D25B3D4CE493A871FA1C5FB93D010/pfrpetersontestemdomain.pdf ; accessed 17 August 2007).
63.
Porter, L. and Barber, A. ( 2006) Closing time: the meaning of place and state-led gentrification in Birmingham’s Eastside, City, 10(2), pp. 215-234.
64.
Powell, J.T. ( 2006) The psychological cost of eminent domain takings and just compensation, Law and Psychology Review, 30, pp. 215-228.
65.
Price, J.H. ( 2005) Florida City considers eminent domain, Washington Times, 3 October, p. A1.
66.
Pritchett, W.E. ( 2003) The ‘public menace’ of blight: urban renewal and the private uses of eminent domain, Yale Law and Policy Review, 21, pp. 1-52.
67.
Reichl, A. ( 1999) Reconstructing Times Square: Politics and Culture in Urban Development. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
68.
Saltman, J. ( 1990a) A Fragile Movement: The Struggle for Neighborhood Stabilization . New York: Greenwood.
69.
Saltman, J. ( 1990b) Neighborhood stabilization: a fragile movement, Sociological Quarterly, 31(4), pp. 531-549.
70.
S. B. Friedman & Company (n. d.) Village of Lake Zurich, IL (http://www.friedmanco.com/clients/zurich/lzurich.htm ; accessed 16 April 2007).
71.
Scott, A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of Image Producing Industries. London: Sage.
72.
Smith, N. (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge.
73.
Smith, N. (1998) Gentrification, in: W. V. Vliet (Ed.) The Encyclopedia of Housing, pp. 198-199. London: Taylor & Francis.
74.
Smith, N. ( 2002) New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy, Antipode, 34(3), pp. 427-450.
75.
Smith, N. ( 2006) Gentrification generalized: from local anomaly to urban "regeneration" as global urban strategy, in: M. S. Fisher and G. Downey (Eds) Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, pp. 191-208. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
76.
Smith, N. and Lefaivre, M. ( 1984) A class analysis of gentrification, in: J. J. Palen and B. London (Eds) Gentrification, Displacement, and Neighborhood Revitalization , pp. 43-63. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
77.
Smith, N. and Williams, P. (Eds) (1986) Gentrification of the City . Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
78.
Solnit, R. and Schwartzenberg, S. ( 2000) Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. New York: Verso.
79.
Stevens, J.P. ( 2005) Susette Kelo et al., v. City ofNew London et al.: opinion of the court. United States Supreme Court, Washington, DC.
80.
Taub, R., Taylor, D. and Dunham, J. ( 1984) Paths of Neighborhood Change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
81.
Thomas, C. (2005) Susette Kelo, et al., Petitioners v. City of New London, Connecticut, et al.: Justice Thomas Dissenting. United States Supreme Court, Washington, DC.
82.
Tsouderos, T. ( 2005) Town’s land takeover has owners on edge; Lake Zurich moves to condemn homes and thrusts itself into forefront of national debate over the seizure of private property for public use, Chicago Tribune, 23 March, p. 1.
83.
Uitermark, J., Duyvendak, J.W. and Kleinhans, R. ( 2007) Gentrification as a governmental strategy: social control and social cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam, Environment and Planning A, 39, pp. 125-141.
84.
Wacquant, L. ( 2008) Relocating gentrification: the working class, science and the state in recent urban research, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(1), pp. 198-205.
85.
Weiss, M.A. ( 1980) The origins and legacy of urban renewal, in: P. Clavel, J. Forester and W. W. Goldsmith (Eds) Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of Austerity, pp. 53-79. New York: Pergamon Press.
86.
Wilson, D. ( 1996) Metaphors, growth coalition discourses, and black poverty neighborhoods in a U.S. city, Antipode, 28(1), pp. 72-96.
87.
Wilson, W.J. ( 1987) The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
88.
Wylie, J. ( 1989) Poletown: Community Betrayed. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
89.
Zukin, S. ( 1982) Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
90.
Zukin, S. ( 1991) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disneyland. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
91.
Zukin, S. ( 1995) The Culture of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.
92.
Zukin, S. ( 1998) Urban lifestlyes: diversity and standardisation of spaces of consumption, Urban Studies, 35(5/6), pp. 825-840.
