City of Cincinnati and Co-Conspirators Smacked Down on Calhoun Street Eminent-Domain Project
This is a gratifying follow-up to a July BizzyBlog post about a troubled University of Cincinnati-area eminent-domain project that has gone nowhere since the properties involved were taken, and began to show signs of falling apart even before Friday’s adverse court ruling.
The news is a serious rebuke (HT Cincinnati Black Blog via NixGuy) to the City’s eminent-domain tyrants and their Clifton-area accomplices:
Cincinnati land seizure overturned
Calhoun Street properties not blighted, judge rules
Last Updated: 1:53 pm | Saturday, January 27, 2007
BY STEVE KEMMEUsing the Norwood eminent-domain case as a model, a state appeals court Friday nullified Cincinnati’s seizure of two parcels on Calhoun Street in Clifton Heights and declared the city’s eminent-domain ordinance unconstitutional.
The ruling reverses a lower-court decision that upheld the city’s right to take the properties.
The city and a developer used a blight study to take dozens of properties as part of a $270 million redevelopment plan along Calhoun Street.
All of the property owners in the redevelopment district except the owners of a former Hardee’s and Arby’s eventually agreed to sell to the developer, the Clifton Heights Community Urban Redevelopment Corp.
The Ohio First District Court of Appeals said in its decision Friday that many factors that Cincinnati used for designating properties “blighted” or “deteriorating” were struck down in the Ohio Supreme Court’s Norwood decision.”
….. Matthew W. Fellerhoff, lawyer for the two property owners, said Cincinnati’s standards for declaring property blighted or deteriorating were even more vague than Norwood’s.
City Solicitor J. Rita McNeil said her office would study the appeals court’s decision before recommending whether the city should appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court.
Give it up, Rita.
Make no mistake — The people with egg on their faces include not only the city, but also the Uptown Consortium led by the University of Cincinnati and its empire-building President Nancy Zimpher, along with her “Pill Hill” hospital compadres and the Cincinnati Zoo. The consortium’s Clifton Heights Community Urban Redevelopment Corp. now has its flagship project officially on the rocks.
Left unsaid in the report by the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Steve Kemme is that at least two of the other property owners in the affected area (written about here in 2004 in the Cincinnati Business Courier) sold out under tremendous pressure and chose not to litigate. Remember that in Ohio, until the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Norwood case (thankfully, a complete victory for property rights), litigation against the eminent domain tyrants was especially difficult, because the government was allowed to take your property first before you could file a lawsuit protesting the action. This was NOT the case in Connecticut, where the Kelo-New London, Connecticut holdouts were able to stay in their homes and hang on to their properties until the matter was fully negotiated and resolved.
The litany of eminent-domain and other property-management missteps by Cincinnati city fathers in the past two decades is long and ugly. Taken in total, the city is financially and structurally worse off for what the know-it-all urban planners have done and attempted to do. Friday’s ruling may finally stop the bleeding caused by people who think they always know better than the marketplace how development should be done, but who have been proven wrong more often than not.
