© FacebookA resident mows his lawn in the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood of Charlestown, Indiana.
Charlestown , Indiana - A town is working to "demolish a working-class neighborhood" by seizing 354 homes and passing the land off to a private commercial developer. Using federal dollars and the highly-abused power of eminent domain, the city intends to evict multitudes of families to make way for economic progress.
The community under fire is called "Pleasant Ridge." It contains hundreds of small homes that were built during World War II as military housing. Today the homes are privately-owned and contain working-class and poor families, many of which have owned their homes for decades.
The City of Charlestown intends to demolish the community in order to allow new commercial and residential real estate to be built in its place - privately-owned real estate. The city
declared its intentions in June 2014, when it applied to the state for permission to use eminent domain and for $5.3 million in "Hardest Hit Funds," a federal grant program administered through Indiana's Blight Elimination Program (BEP). The land grab might not have been economically feasible if not for being directly subsidized and incentivized by the federal government.
Protests against the looming seizure have persisted for months, and Pleasant Ridge formed its own neighborhood association this summer to coordinate opposition. The government's decision on the project is supposed to be made in November or December.
The perilous power of eminent domain has been in use for as long as governments have existed, but it was traditionally (and constitutionally) constrained to projects involving "public use" of the land. These might have included roads or government facilities.
In 2005, however, the U.S. Supreme Court egregiously ruled that it was "constitutional" for a city to seize homes for the benefit of private developers (see: Kelo v. City of New London). The benefits of "economic development" have been henceforth recognized to trump private property rights in the USA. In other words, people can be involuntarily kicked off land they own free-and-clear, if government bureaucrats believe another private party could use it to bring in more tax revenue for the city.The City of Charlestown has been further justifying its authoritarian maneuver by claiming that the Pleasant Ridge community is "blighted" and full of drugs, crime, and "transients." Officials claim building retail stores and new homes would be an improvement to Charlestown.
Residents contest these allegations, striking blows at the city's credibility. And, even if the claims were found to contain shades of truth, they would not morally excuse the wholesale violation of any family's right to be secure in their own private property.
Comment: This article clearly shows how the current economic conditions are unsustainable and cannot continue without a serious reset of some kind.