A Philadelphia Artist Fights An Epic Eminent Domain Battle
“Would someone please help James Dupree already?
For weeks I’ve been following this story. Hopefully you know it by now. In case you don’t, he’s the artist who owns a building in West Philly and he’s being forced out, under the city’s “Eminent Domain” rules, in order to make way for a grocery store. Apparently, the neighborhood really needs a grocery store. So much so that the city is compelled to make him an offer he can’t refuse: sell his property at a much-lower-than-market price or watch his building be bulldozed. Nice. Dupree is fighting the city. He’s enlisted some major people in the art world to back him up too.
Eminent Domain? It’s best defined this way: “The power to take private property for public use by a state, municipality, or private person or corporation authorized to exercise functions of public character, following the payment of just compensation to the owner of that property.””
Marks, Gene. Huffington Poat 31 January 2014.