New York City Unleashes Eminent Domain Abuse on Immigrant Dry Cleaners in East Harlem
“Eminent domain abuse has reared its ugly head in East Harlem. As Ginger Adams Otis reports in the New York Daily News, city officials plan to seize a family-owned dry cleaning business and then hand the forcibly vacated land to a wealthy private developer.
Damon Bae, whose parents opened the Fancy Cleaners business after immigrating to the United States from Korea in 1981, told the Daily News that “the city has offered my family about 30 cents on the dollar on the market value for what our three lots are worth—that’s not enough to buy anything comparable in East Harlem today….The city’s working so hard to meet the developer’s timeline; meanwhile, we’re trying to stay in business.”
According to city officials, Bae’s property is “blighted,” the condition of severe disrepair required to trigger a taking under state eminent domain law. Yet as Bae told the Daily News, “the only ‘blight’ was in the [city-owned] vacant lots the city allowed to sit empty” nearby. In other words, the local government created the very conditions that it is now using as a pretext for seizing the Bae family’s property.
Unfortunately for the Baes and others like them, the U.S. Supreme Court turned a blind eye to this sort of abuse in the 2005 case of Kelo v. City of New London. On the state level, New York’s highest court—the Court of Appeals—ruled 6-1 in 2009 to let the state seize property on behalf of the real estate tycoon Bruce Ratner and his Atlantic Yards/Barclay’s Center basketball stadium project in Brooklyn.”
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Root, Damon. Reason 11 January 2018.