One of the few good things to come out of the nation’s recent financial crisis was an end to wasteful “redevelopment” agencies in California that had for decades been violating property rights by abusing the power of eminent domain. Unfortunately, step-by-step, California legislators are intent on rolling back that victory.

Eminent domain is the government’s power to take land, homes, businesses or other property for public use, when the government pays the owner “just compensation.” In California, until 2012, the power was frequently used by local governments and state-subsidized “redevelopment agencies” to take property not to build a school, or a road or a firehouse — but merely to transfer the property from one owner to another private owner in the hope that the new owner would use the property in a way that would generate more taxes or jobs.

In 2012, facing a budget crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature dissolved the hundreds of state agencies responsible for ill-conceived redevelopment projects that created losses for the state. However, last year, California government officials lost their memory and enacted a new law that resuscitated redevelopment agencies with eminent domain authority.

A new bill, AB 2492, is now being pushed by some legislators to increase funding for government-led redevelopment schemes. It also makes it easier to declare private property “blighted,” in some cases only because the median income of the occupants is lower than city or county medians.


Commenting on this kind of eminent domain, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the 2005 case Kelo v. New London, “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.”

This is a story I know not only from my experience as a property rights lawyer, but from my own family history. My family’s business, a tire and brake repair shop in La Mesa, was taken through eminent domain to make way for a Costco about 20 years ago.

Costco presumably did and continues to generate more in taxes than the family business. Some lawyers and developers probably did pretty well, too.

But my parents’ livelihood was destroyed, along with their retirement savings, which consisted mainly of the equity in their business. Dozens of employees were out of work.


The “just compensation” offered to them by the city was laughably inadequate and the litigation about the matter dragged on for years, forcing my parents — who had never paid a single bill late in 30 years — into bankruptcy.

Thankfully, they managed to start a new business during the years that most people retire, and to create a little financial security in the ensuing decade.

Ours was not the only family whose American Dream was upended by a redevelopment agency because members of a local city council thought some other business might took prettier from the roadway or that a different business might generate more taxes for city coffers. Redevelopment agencies used their power of eminent domain hundreds of times in the decade prior to reform.

And for what? As the California Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote in 2011, “The state’s costs associated with redevelopment have grown markedly over the last couple decades, yet we find no reliable evidence that this program improves overall economic development,” concluding that the alleged gains in jobs from redevelopment “would have occurred independently of the redevelopment agency.”


The right to keep and use the property one has earned is among our most important civil rights. There are no good reasons to double down on a bad idea by expanding local governments’ power to abuse eminent domain.

Salzman is an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation and director of PLF’s Liberty Clinic Project.