Reason Writers Around Town: Radley Balko Writes for Slate on Montgomery, Alabama's Contempt for Property Rights

Over the last 10 years, the city of Montgomery, Alabama has condemned hundreds of private homes as "blighted," demolished them, then sent the home's owners a bill for the demolition. What's behind it? Over at Slate, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko looks at the possible causes and finds the usual cozy government-developer relationships. But Balko also finds that, perversely, many of the demolished homes owned by African-Americans happen to lie along a federally-funded civil rights trail commemorating the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Comments

[J sub D]

Hey, it's all about Urban Renewal. Or as it is more accurately known in the black community, Negro Removal.

[Po-Po]

I know all about driving while black but home-owning while black? Do I call it a H.O.W.B.? A Howbee?

I mean, how the fuck exactly am I supposed to write that damn charge up?

Fucking bureaucrats don't know shit about properly conducting an oppression! Guess I'll just throw them into the streets and call it a crack related issue or something...

[Old Salt]

If I were more superstitious or religious, I'd be worried about our forefathers climbing out of their graves and kicking every political ass they came across in a Final Fight Arcade style!

And it would be the awesome fucking thing ever to watch...

[cynical]

Yeah, nothing pisses the Founding Fathers off more than the repression of black people. Wait, what?

[Old Man]

I think he was talking more about the using the government to legally(?) take peoples property...

[MNG]

One of my biggest dissappointments with Barry (I expressed it way back before he ran though regarding liberals in general) is that Obama did not try to make liberals see that the reasoning in Kelo makes this an issue liberals should care about. As the dissents pointed out takings will more often than not be in favor of the politically connected and economically powerful and to the detriment of the opposite. Liberals really f*cked up in not trying to own this issue.

[J sub D]

But Kelo gives the government more power in the eternal statist quest to control every aspect of everybody's lives.

It's all very progressive.

[Cyto]

Yep. Property rights are anathema to progressivism. Remember Joe the Plumber and "spread it around"? Same deal.

Their mentality is "we have to take away your homes and tear them down so that we can build subsidized housing for you to live in."

[MNG]

J
Not all progressives believe in expaning government power all the time. C'mon, you're smarter than that.

I mean, who do you think the ACLU is suing in all those criminal cases, at the very least.

[Yonemoto]

Progressives != Civil liberties.

I mean. C'mon. FDR.

[BakedPenguin]

As the dissents pointed out takings will more often than not be in favor of the politically connected and economically powerful and to the detriment of the opposite.

Just like economic regulation. I won't hold my breath waiting for liberals to realize that, either.

[Fuck property owners]

They "see it" and Obama "sees it", they understand the implications and fully support it. They didn't fuck up, this is what they wanted.

[Yonemoto]

"takings will more often than not be in favor of the politically connected and economically powerful and to the detriment of the opposite."

Oh so takings, but not regulations? How about income redistribution?

[cynical]

Liberals have about as much power and influence as libertarians. Progressives are in charge now, bitch, and they've got no problem dicking over the inferior classes in their quest to reform humanity and shove utopia down everyone's throats.

[Rock Action]

When you are skeptical of the notion of private property in the first place, it becomes a balancing act. Throw a penny at a law school and you'll probably hit a professor that feels this way.

Kelo's dissenters were Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Rehnquist.

Whatever misgivings this site might have with them, the left/right, or if you prefer, the statist/anti-statist split was pretty clear when it came to property rights.

O'Connor's questioning during the oral arguments was especially righteous.

[Chris Mallory]

The "Civil/Human" Rights commissions that infect every level of government from the smallest town to the Feds don't consider property rights to be human rights. Doing so would mean saying that maybe Rand Paul was right when he questioned the CRA.

[Fuck property owners]

To "be in favor of the politically connected" is our goal.

[Trespassers W]

Slate? They're still doing that?

[R C Union Hack]

many of the demolished homes owned by African-Americans happen to lie along a federally-funded civil rights trail commemorating the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery.

That may be the most bitterly ironic thing I've read in my life.

[joe from somewhere else]

This story needs a dead dog.

[Pip]

"many of the demolished homes owned by African-Americans happen to lie along a federally-funded civil rights trail commemorating the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery."

Proof again that blacks can't maintain their properties.