It has been a little over eight years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided that homeowners in New London, Conn., had no property rights. In 2005, residents in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London were told they had to abandon their homes so the city’s government could demolish them and hand the property over to developers to build hotels, health clubs and new condominiums.
The Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling, with a 5-4 decision, that the Fifth Amendment’s “taking clause” could extend to city governments that wanted to remove old structures and build something for the betterment of the community. Traditionally, such seizure of personal property, known as “eminent domain," had been limited to a government’s need to build facilities like schools or police stations, according to a recent story in the Boston Globe.
Today, the land that was cleared remains a 90-acre barren field with waist-high weeds.
