Kelo and the Left

A good article by blogger Matt Welch in the LA Times:

The project would displace, among other businesses, the Bernard Luggage store, which has stuck by the neighborhood through thick and mostly thin over the last 55 years. According to City News Service, at a City Council meeting Garcetti said the city would not use its powers of eminent domain to force property owners to sell, unless the developers were unable to reach a deal with the landowners. In other words, the government won't take your property unless you refuse to sell. How comforting.

In California, private-property eminent domain transfers must be conducted under the legal cover of "blight," which has come to mean "prime real estate in a rapidly gentrifying area."

In downtown Alhambra, where city officials have been jealously eyeing the success of old towns in Pasadena and Monrovia, the "blight" includes the Museum of Contemporary Arab Art and 60 other businesses. All stand in the way of proposed luxury condos and up-market shops. Similar stories are percolating in places as diverse as Palmdale, La Puente and Newhall.California City, in the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base, came up with a novel interpretation of blight to separate a landowner from some real estate coveted by Hyundai — it declared a patch of unused desert as "blighted." So where is that Democratic Party concern for the "little guy" we've heard so much about? Subsumed by paranoia about the right. "The Kelo backlash is tempting, but it's wrong," warned Alyssa Katz in American Prospect Online. "In seeking to limit public power over urban planning, well-meaning community activists are lending strength to [the] conservative movement."

I know Matt probably hates being known as a blogger, but he is.