Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

The Columbia University expansion case should reach a reckoning this week at the U.S. Supreme Court, which, if in the unlikely case it accepts the appeal, could place a check on eminent domain as practiced in New York State. As I wrote in September, after seeing a surprising Appellate Division victory o verturned unanimously by the state Court of Appeals, which relied on its Atlantic Yards decision, Tuck-It-Away owner Nick Sprayregen and the Kaur/Singh family are trying to get to the Supreme Court. On his Inverse Condemnation blog, land use attorney Robert Thomas has posted the entire set of briefs in the petition for certiorari ( Tuck-It-Away, Inc. v. New York State Urban Dev. Corp. ) at the United States Supreme Court. Will cert be granted? The justices will meet December 10 to consider a number of cases and are expected to announce December 13 which cases they will accept (aka "grant certiorari"). It's always a long shot to get a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pl...

As plaintiff Nick Sprayregen of Tuck-It-Away Storage pledged, he'd go to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight the state's pursuit of eminent domain in the Columbia University. Now, after seeing a surprising Appellate Division victory overturned unanimously by the state Court of Appeals, which relied on its Atlantic Yards decision, Sprayregen and the Kaur/Singh family that owns a gas station on the project site have filed their Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (below), the request for the court to hear the case. It's always a long shot--fewer than 1% of petitions are granted --but this petition, authored by attorney Norman Siegel and a host of others, hammers home the state court's failure to address the guidelines seemingly set forth in Justice John Paul Stevens's majority opinion and Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurrence in the 2005 Kelo v. New London case, in which the court upheld eminent domain by a 5-4 margin. Ignoring Kelo ? The petition states: In sharp c...


For those of us who have seen civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, victorious so far in the effort to block eminent domain for the Columbia University expansion, speak on panels or testify before an oversight hearing , most of his critique yesterday on "The Use (or Misuse) of Eminent Domain in NYC" at New York Law School ( video ) was not unfamiliar. Siegel made some compelling points about eminent domain abuses, but more intriguing was the respondent, land use use attorney Ross Moskowitz , who offered a full defense of the status quo, warning of abuses--notably, the potential for holdouts to distort the process--while ignoring the problems raised in both the Columbia and Atlantic Yards cases. Siegel's case Siegel first noted that the definition of blight--"substandard or insanitary"--is vague, inviting subjectivity, selective enforcement, and favoritism. The law should be clarified, he said, noting that the Supreme Court of Ohio, in the 2006 Norwood ca...

Thanks to the full video from the January 5 state Senate oversight hearing on eminent domain, it's worth a look at the Empire State Development Corporation's (ESDC) historical explanation for its blight studies, and civil rights attorney Norman Siegel's forceful comment, in which he suggested that the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr.--whose 1968 assassination spurred the establishment of the agency--had been perverted. During the hearing, state Senator Bill Perkins tried to drill down to the ESDCs standards regarding blight after AKRF delivers the "study of neighborhood conditions" . "Let me ask you, what is your standard that you use, to determine blight," he asked ESDC General Counsel Anita Laremont. "Do you have like a sheet, or some other kind of measures that you use that, when you get facts, you look at them in terms of those measures and you say, OK, bingo, it has measured up to the definition of blight?" "No," responded Lar...

How things have changed. A little more four years ago, state Senator David Paterson and Council Member Bill Perkins were of the same mind on eminent domain, especially concerned about Columbia University's planned expansion in West Harlem, an area in their districts. They called for a moratorium on the use of eminent domain in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 5-4 Kelo vs. New London decision upholding eminent domain for economic development. Now Perkins is in the state Senate, the leader of a somewhat lonely legislative effort to reform the state's eminent domain laws, much criticized by not only the libertarian Institute for Justice but also civil rights lawyers like the diehard liberal Norman Siegel . (Perkins has a letter in today's Times asserting that the state's "attempted taking of private property on behalf of Columbia University illustrates how the current process lacks accountability, transparency or meaningful public participati...

If last night was an example, the Atlantic Yards documentary Battle of Brooklyn is sure to spark a lot of discussion. A screening of just a half-hour of the film-in-progress was held last night at New York University’s Cantor Center, and the audience—a mix of those interested in Atlantic Yards, eminent domain, and film—had a lot of questions for the panel set up afterwards. Among the issues: --why Daniel Goldstein, a protagonist in the film and the spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), chose to stay in his apartment rather than take a seemingly generous buyout (short answer: principle) --why it’s tough to win eminent domain challenges in New York state and how it might change (short answer: structural bias in favor of condemnors, but a spotlight on bad practices has emerged) --how people on the left feel about alliances with the libertarians of the Institute for Justice (IJ), leader of the national fight against eminent domain (short answer: fine, and maybe liberals who...