NYC Shutters Small Businesses in the Name of Progress
“On a day that’s become known around the country as Small Business Saturday, dozens of small businesses just east of New York City’s Citi Field in Willets Point, Queens, may shut their doors.
As part of a $3 billion redevelopment plan that will include a hotel, a retail mall and a restaurant, the city is giving existing business owners until Nov. 30 to accept an offer of 12-months rent to vacate their shops. If they wait till January 31, owners will get just six months rent. If they hold out, tenant businesses may wind up with nothing at all.
Eminent domain–the taking of private property for the public good while fairly compensating the owners–has a long and not always noble history. The power has traditionally been used to clear the way for bridges, highways or other clearly public uses, but in recent years, governments have increasingly used the tool to benefit private interests in the name of generating more jobs and taxes.
Just down the road in Brooklyn, for example, New York used the power of eminent domain to raze private homes and businesses to make way for a complex called the Atlantic Yards, which today is home to the Barclays Center, a sports arena where the Nets basketball team plays. In the last few years, the drugstore chain CVS has been both the victim and the beneficiary of eminent domain in cities around the U.S.”
Ransom, Diana. Inc 27 November 2013.