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Little Pink Houses for SPN Members
By John E. Kramer
Published on Tuesday, June 09, 2009
ARTICLES
Once in a rare while, a fight over rights captures the nation's attention.
Such battles offer transformative opportunities - chances to change the world through the retelling of the stories of those at the center of the struggle. Think of Rosa Parks and civil rights.
So it was with Susette Kelo and her fight to protect her little pink house in New London, Connecticut. Much like Ms. Parks, Susette Kelo wasn't asking for much; all she wanted was to be left alone ... in Susette's case, to enjoy the home that was rightfully hers.
But at the behest of her new next-door neighbor, Pfizer, the city and a private development agency conspired to take her home from her for a private development. Now - four years after the ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the taking of Kelo's land for another private party who merely had the prospect of creating more jobs and taxes with the property - the land where Susette Kelo's neighborhood once stood remains a brown, barren field: this after spending $78 million in taxpayer money.
As award-winning investigative journalist Jeff Benedict recently pointed out to SPN organizations from coast to coast, "The only jobs created from the Kelo debacle were for the crews that bulldozed the neighborhood." Benedict, the author of Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage (Grand Central Publishing), recently made the rounds to SPN members telling how such a miscarriage of justice could happen in America. Benedict and Kelo spoke together at events organized by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Pioneer Institute, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Evergreen Freedom Foundation and Cato Institute. Benedict also spoke on behalf of the Goldwater Institute.
Texas Public Policy Foundation used the opportunity to kick off a legislative briefing before a packed house. Afterwards, Benedict, Kelo, Institute for Justice senior attorney Dana Berliner and TPPF representatives appeared at a press conference with the governor calling for improved eminent domain reform, including a state constitutional amendment.
The Mackinac Center, which in 2006 used the Kelo ruling to draft and pass "Proposal 4" to better protect property in Michigan, preceded their book forum with a major local media expedition and followed it with a bus tour of local areas where property rights are still under assault.
Evergreen Freedom Foundation used the Kelo book event to launch its new Property Rights Center, which seeks toeducate and activateWashington residents in the fight to protect private property against unwarranted government encroachment. A pre-event briefing with Jeff Benedict was packed withrepresentatives from property rights groups across Washington,formingthe core ofacoalition EFF's new center can work withto advance individuals' rights.
The Institute for Justice will gladly team up with other SPN members. We can co-sponsor events, or train activists through IJ's Castle Coalition.
There is an important epilogue to Susette Kelo's fight. In just the past four years since the Kelo ruling, 43 states have now changed their laws to better protect the rights of property owners. This is an enormous accomplishment made possible by the teamwork of SPN organizations nationwide and the Institute for Justice. Even the weakest of these reforms is an improvement over the pre-Kelo legal landscape. In the more than 20 states that changed their blight laws, property owners are actually better protected than they would have been even if Kelo had come out the right way.
All of this and the reforms still to come are especially remarkable when you consider the powerful interest groups - municipal officials, developers and planners - who have fought so desperately to preserve their power.Such reforms sparked by the fight for Susette Kelo's little pink house are testimony to the power of ordinary Americans, who don't have full-time lobbyists or special access to legislators, when they demand their rights be respected.
John E. Kramer is the Institute for Justice's vice president for communications. He can be reached at jkramer@ij.org.
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