Town Secretly Seizes Developers' Property Then Threatens Them With Trespassing Citation
The owners, who were planning an affordable housing project on the site, first learned about the seizure from the mayor's social media post.
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week's newsletter focuses on some shocking updates to a Rhode Island eminent domain case we covered last month.
As readers might recall, in the Providence suburb of Johnston, the town government and its very outspoken mayor have been attempting to seize a family of developers' land to prevent their construction of an unsubsidized affordable housing project.
Last week the developers sued to stop the seizure in federal court, alleging that the "municipal campus" Johnston was seizing the land for was merely a pretext to stop new affordable housing.
You are reading Rent Free from Christian Britschgi and Reason. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.
Already, Rhode Island law establishes a fairly elaborate process that local governments have to follow when using eminent domain to take land for public buildings.
The developers' constitutional challenge to the town's seizure would typically delay things even more.
But in a surprise turn of events late last week, the town is claiming to have already seized the developers' plot without providing any advance notice to the owners and without following the processes laid down in Rhode Island law.
The owners first learned of the seizure via Johnston's mayor's X post. With the town now alleging that the seizure is complete, it's telling the former owners of the land they have until Friday to get off it or else they'll be cited for trespassing.
In response, the developers are now filing for a temporary restraining order to stop what they describe as the town's unprecedented lawlessness in taking the land.
"In 40 years, I've seen some pretty outrageous exercises of eminent domain powers. Never anything like this," says Robert Thomas, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public interest law firm, who is representing the developers.
Posting Through It (Eminent Domain)
For the past several years, Lucille Santoro, Salvatore Compagnone, Ralph Santoro, and Suzanne Santoro, a family of Rhode Island developers and their various LLCs, had been in talks with Johnston officials about developing a 31-acre site the family owned on the edge of town.
Those plans crystalized in December 2024, when the Santoro family participated in a pre-application meeting with city officials, where they discussed their plan to build a 254-unit project.
Johnston's local zoning code would not have allowed that many units on the site. However, amendments made to the state's longstanding affordable housing law gave developers a large "density bonus" if they built rent-restricted low- and moderate-income housing.
Because the density was generous enough and the rent restrictions high enough, the Santoro family was able to use the law to propose a completely privately funded "affordable housing" project on their land.
The Pushback
The project did not sit well with Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena, who wrote an open letter opposing the project shortly after the Santoro family filed their application.
In that letter, dated December 3, 2024, the mayor said the town would "roll out the red carpet" for single-family homes on the site. But the traffic, school students, and drainage issues resulting from any large multifamily development would produce an intolerable "trifecta of chaos."
"If you insist on moving forward with the currently proposed project, I will use all the powers of government that I have to stop it," wrote Polisena.
In his letter, Polisena proposed challenging the constitutionality of the Rhode Island state law the developers were using to bypass local density limits.
Soon enough, the mayor had settled on a new tactic: The town would use eminent domain to take the land for a new "municipal campus," including a new town hall and police and fire station, on the site.
The eminent domain move came as a surprise to the developers. In what would become a pattern, the mayor posted on social media that the town would consider a resolution on the seizure on the Santoro family property the following day.
Kelley Morris Salvatore, a Rhode Island attorney representing the project, told The Providence Journal that she only found out about the eminent domain plans after a reporter contacted her about them.
In comments to Reason a few days after the eminent domain resolution was approved, Salvatore said "[the mayor's] primary purpose is clearly to block this project," noting that plans for a municipal campus had "literally never been discussed publicly ever before."
At the time, Salvatore said the resolution would be the first step in a long eminent domain process. She said her clients would likely accept an offer from the town to buy the land, provided it was a fair offer.
The Lawsuit
As it turned out, things escalated pretty quickly. Last Monday, the town approved another resolution authorizing the seizure of the property and laying out a bespoke process for taking the property.
The next day, the Santoro family, with the assistance of the PLF, filed a challenge to the seizure in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island.
The U.S. Constitution gives governments wide eminent domain authority to take property for a "public use" and a new municipal campus would certainly seem to qualify as a public use.
But the Santoro family argues in their lawsuit that the lack of any public discussion, let alone approved plans or funding, for a municipal campus shows that said campus is a convenient fiction.
"The town's stated uses, purposes, and necessity for the taking are false and a sham and a pretense," reads the complaint. Such a sham taking violates the Fifth Amendment's Public Use Clause as well as the Due Process protections of the 14th Amendment.
Their lawsuit also argues that the town resolution creating its own process for eminent domaining the land violates a Rhode Island state law that lays out the necessary procedures for taking private property for municipal buildings.
The Seizure
After the Santoro family filed that lawsuit last Tuesday, things escalated very quickly.
On Wednesday, the town filed documents with Johnston's land evidence record office citing the eminent domain resolution and transferring the property's title to the town. The town did not inform the Santoro family or its lawyers that it'd taken the property.
The same day, the town filed its own petition in Rhode Island state court asking to deposit the payment of $775,000 for the Santoro family's plot with the court.
Here too, the town did not notify the Santoro family or their lawyers of that petition. Nor did they inform them of a hearing held this past Friday where the state court (without the Santoro family or their lawyers present) accepted the town's deposit petition.
Only after that hearing on Friday did the town provide any notice of the completed seizure. Polisena posted on X that the town had officially acquired the Santoro family land via eminent domain.
At 10:40 a.m. today, through a petition in Providence Superior Court, the Town of Johnston officially acquired ownership of the property at 178-200 George Waterman Road by eminent domain.
— Joe Polisena Jr. (@JosephPolisena) March 14, 2025
A few hours later, the town's lawyer, William Conley, sent Salvatore, the Santoro family's lawyer, a letter saying that the title for the property had been transferred and the funds for it had been paid.
Conley's letter gave the Santoro family until this Friday to remove any vehicles or personal belongings they had on the site. If they left anything behind, they'd be served a "no trespass" notice.
"They literally [made] up this process," says Thomas, the PLF lawyer who is also representing the Santoro family. "And the process is 'we go to court, we tell the court what we think the property is worth, we put that money into an account in the court, and by that, we own your property, and we can go down and change the registration and title on your property.'"
"They purposefully withheld telling us. It really looks to us like they're trying to change the ground rules and the factual situation as fast as they can" with an eye toward undermining the Santoro family's federal lawsuit, he tells Reason.
Yesterday, the Santoro family's lawyers filed for a temporary restraining order to stop the town from taking over the property.
"This isn't a typical taking, but 'municipal thuggery,'" reads the request for the restraining order. "Indeed, it is among the most unusual and aberrant abuses of a sovereign power imaginable."
A hearing on the temporary restraining order is scheduled for later this afternoon.
Quick Links
- Works in Progress has a fantastic new essay on Britain's disastrous attempt to implement a land value tax in the early 20th century. To make a long story short, the implementation was so complex, and the tax so burdensome, that new home construction fell off a cliff, and the Liberal government that tried to implement the tax ended up repealing it.
- Doug Burgum and Scott Turner, respectively the secretaries for the Departments of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), announced a new partnership to build housing on currently underutilized federal lands. It's a good idea, although details on the new initiative are sparse.
- A new survey from the Institute for Family Studies finds that young families are willing to tolerate longer commutes and smaller yards in exchange for more spacious, affordable single-family homes.
- American Enterprise Institute scholar Howard Husock suggests HUD should condition federal housing aid on localities repealing their rent control policies.
- Fair housing groups are suing the Trump administration over its termination of some $30 million in federal grants to fair housing nonprofits.
