Fred Schulte, Ben Protess and Lagan Sebert, Huffington Post Investigative Fund May 20, 2010
One raw day in early February, Vicki Valentine stood by helplessly as real estate investors snatched her West Baltimore home over what began with an unpaid city water bill of $362.
As snow threatened to fall, she watched a work crew hired by the new owners punch out the lock on her front door. A sheriff’s deputy was on the scene while Valentine and her teenage son piled whatever they could into a borrowed car.
Running out of time, Valentine scrambled to pack up clothing and mementos. The home had been her family’s for nearly three decades, and her father had paid off the mortgage in 1984.
“It’s hard to say goodbye to this house,” she said. “It’s like someone forcing you out of something that belongs to you. I don’t get it.”
Valentine lost the two-story brick row home after the city sold her debt to investors through a contentious and byzantine legal process called a “tax sale.” This little-known type of foreclosure can enrich investors as growing numbers of property owners struggle to pay their bills.
These foreclosed homeowners are not the families making headlines for taking on mortgages they could ill afford. Families ensnared in the tax sale sometimes are unable to overcome relatively small debts owed to local tax collectors.
Rather than collect the overdue money they are owed, many local governments are selling tax liens. Buyers range from behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase & Co, and some regional banks and law firms, to small-fry investors lured by late-night television commercials promising quick riches. Investors generally bid in an auction for the right to collect delinquent taxes and other municipal debts on property owners, sometimes by paying only a few hundred dollars. When owners can’t pay, investors can pick up property at bargain prices.
It can be a good deal for everyone except the property owner. Selling the debts to investors can help governments efficiently ease budget woes without having the added expenses of debt collection, foreclosing and being a landlord.
Investors, meanwhile, can rake in hefty profits. That’s because they can tack on fees and steep interest rates, which can amount to 18 percent annually in Baltimore.
In Valentine’s case, legal fees and other charges climbed past $3,600 — nearly 10 times her original bill.
Investors purchased an estimated $30 billion of real estate tax debt held by governments across the country in 2009, double the amount a year earlier, according to the Florida-based National Tax Lien Association. Altogether, 29 states and the District of Columbia can sell tax lien debt to investors.
Lien sales in Baltimore have nearly doubled since the housing bubble of 2006. On Monday, the city sold 12,689 liens — a probable record. Properties ranged from boarded-up shells and vacant lots to row homes in gentrified neighborhoods and some commercial buildings.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Government and Big Corporations Are 'One Entity' Controlled by the Financial Elite
Judge Napolitano responds to a case of a repeated attempt to seize farm land to build a bridge.
When new owners took over an apartment building in the New York City borough of Queens, they promptly set about filing eviction notices, suing nearly half of the building's tenants — some of them multiple times — within the first 16 months. That amounted to 965 court proceedings against 2,124 apartments, compared with just 50 court proceedings in the final year of the previous owner. The complaints alleged that the tenants were subletting illegally or had not paid their rent or security deposits, even though the tenants often had records proving otherwise.To the tenants, it seemed as though every possible legal vulnerability was being sought out in an effort to force them out.
This kind of activity — flushing out low-rent tenants and replacing them with wealthier new renters — has been a staple of strong real estate markets for years. What was different over the past few years was how widespread this Dickensian business model had become, largely fueled by Wall Street money seeking high rates of return. Another difference was how much the general investing public — through university endowments and pension funds — became party to such morally dubious schemes. Consider it another footnote to the Gilded Age we just passed through.
This investment trend, which flourished from 2005 until the financial crisis hit in 2008, threatened a cherished pillar of urban policy — affordable housing, which has long been regarded as essential for maintaining vibrant diversity in our cities. The victims are among the huge numbers of Americans (estimated at close to 100 million before the latest housing boom promoting homeownership) who rent their primary residences — poor, working-class and even middle-class folks — who have been overshadowed in the deluge of media coverage of the debacle in single-family housing. (Affordable housing refers to that costing no more than a third of a family's income.)
But as private equity funds seized on the rental market in major cities in recent years, all this was jeopardized by the need to generate fat returns of 15%-20% per annum.Worse, this business model was based on a dirty secret — expelling as many existing tenants as possible. This is the thuggish reality behind otherwise respectable-sounding prospectuses offered to investors to explain how they could service high debt on mortgage-backed securities.
"The borrower anticipates to recapture approximately 20%-30% of the units [roughly within the first year] and 10% a year thereafter," explained a prospectus for a portfolio of buildings in upper Manhattan being bought by Apollo Real Estate Advisers (now AREA Property Partners), with a primary mortgage from a Credit Suisse subsidiary.
The normal turnover rate in cheap or moderate rent-regulated apartments in New York City is 5.6%, according to data from the New York City Rent Guidelines Board.
"From a public policy standpoint, you can make a strong case that it is not desirable [for Wall Street money to be in this market], and equally strong you can say that housing regulators or authorities in New York and most other cities have been asleep at the wheel for the last five and 10 years — this stuff is going on everywhere," says Guy Cecala, CEO of Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, a stable of industry newsletters, who worries that the very idea of affordable housing is under threat.
But these securitized transactions were considered a legitimate business strategy by investors, who typically focus on the cash flow from these deals, not the fine points on how cash is generated.
"These could have all been brothels or sweatshops underlying them, and nobody would know that either," says Cecala, who notes that "one of the reasons for buying securities ... is supposedly you don't have to worry about any of that; someone else is supposed to have signed off on the legality of the transactions, the business practices, everything."
Those packaging these investments say they regarded them as aboveboard, though their defense is less than robust. Key players included leading banks in tandem with some of the biggest names in real estate and private equity, none of whom would have missed that high tenant turnover was the main motor for profits.
"We truly went into this trying to turn housing that was run very, very poorly by slumlords into affordable working-class housing, and to be portrayed like this is somewhat upsetting, to be quite frank," says Richard Mack, who works at AREA Property Partners, a $9 billion partnership, with his father William, who got his start in 1963 with a 5-acre plot of New Jersey swampland. The turnover targets were perhaps "more aggressive than people think they should have been," but he says, "Life is too short for us to have done this, with this small a part of our portfolio, if we didn't actually think we were doing the right thing. Whether or not we executed as perfectly as we could — I'm sure that we made mistakes — our true intention here was to make money by doing good."
Tenants pried from their homes would see it differently. In a typical Queens building, hired legal guns were able to achieve 23% turnover in the first year of new owners, or about double that of a typical building in Manhattan, where the culture of tenant rights is stronger, according to a new study by affordable-housing advocates, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.
The study focused on New York City, where Wall Street money made the most inroads — capturing about 100,000 units (out of the city's 2.5 million), or about 10% of the city's rent-regulated apartments before the real estate bubble collapse.
In this process, the report explains, the investor-owners were helped by the fact that many transitional neighborhood tenants were new (and possibly undocumented) immigrants, whose lack of English fluency and legal representation put them at a disadvantage in housing court, where deals are typically hammered out with owners' lawyers before ever reaching the judges. Those actually executing these orders were often conflicted about it.
"Having a large property owner as a client is great for the volume of work, but if you ask me about it morally or ethically, well, I'd rather not say," admits a housing court attorney who asked not to be identified.
Others are inclined to give big investors the benefit of the doubt.
"If people are really stretching the law — doing outright harassment to remove tenants — that's not a good thing, but I don't think that most big institutional investors knowingly will target deals like that or knowingly target deals with partners where they think that might happen," says Andy McCulloch, senior residential analyst with Green Street Advisors, a property research shop.
In the end, though, many new owners have been unable to meet their overly ambitious rent roll increase targets,and many of these investments are in danger of buckling under the high debt servicing costs. Finance industry watch lists are already full of private-equity-financed deals in danger of default. That has local officials scrambling to find "preservation buyers" who are willing to take on these properties with the expectation of a more modest 7%-8% annual return.
"I do think it is a problem ... and that's why we are putting our resources to bear to try to correct the problem before it becomes a bigger problem than we can tackle," says Rafael Cestero, commissioner of New York's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
"Ownership of rental properties in New York City is a long-term proposition, and if you do it right, you can make a fair profit, but trying to make a short-term investment is where you can get yourself in trouble."
Nowhere was that more true than in the ill-conceived investment to turn the twinned 11,000-unit middle-class housing complex known as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, built originally to accommodate World War II veterans, into luxury housing, for which limits on yearly rent increases are chucked in favor or whatever the market will bear. The prospectus offered by the lead investors, Tishman Speyer and Larry Fink's asset-management fund BlackRock, imagined evicting 50% of rent-regulated tenants in just a few years. But tenants fought back and won in a court decision that also undercut plans for using city tax abatements to further sweeten returns on apartments pushed into luxury decontrol. The upshot, according to a recent Deutsche Bank analysis, is that the property, purchased in late 2006 for $5.4 billion, "would fetch less than $2 billion if sold into the current dislocated market." It added that the most natural buyer was MetLife, the insurer and original owner, in part because it represented "patient capital."
Friday, March 12, 2010
Who's the Boss, the States or the Federal Government?
Is the federal government sovereign, with authority over state governments? Or, are individual state governments sovereign, with authority over the federal government? It's a simple question; it's the answer that's a problem.
The federal government exists because representatives of the states created it. This fact should provide a clue. The federal government was designed by representatives from the states in a document called the Constitution of the United States. The federal government became a reality when the Constitution was ratified by the 9th state, New Hampshire, on June 21, 1788. This infant government, created by the states, began operation March 4, 1789. From that day until this, people have been arguing over whether the federal government or the states possess the supreme authority.
It is quite clear that the people who designed the federal government intended it to be limited in its power. Article 1, Section 8 sets forth 17 enumerated powers of the federal government. The first clause empowers the new government to "lay and collect taxes," to provide for the "defense and general welfare" of the United States. Here's where the argument gets nasty.
One group of people argues that the phrase "general welfare" means whatever Congress wants it to mean with no limitations. Another group of people argues that if this is what the designers intended, why on earth would they have bothered to enumerate the remaining 16 specific powers? It's a reasonable question that the first group prefers to ignore rather than answer.
To be sure that the federal government's authority stayed limited, the primary architect of the Constitution, James Madison, introduced the Bill of Rights in the very first Congress in 1789. These first ten Amendments further clarify the authority and limitations of the federal government. The 10th Amendment in particular, limits the federal government to those powers enumerated in the Constitution and explicitly reserves all other powers to the states and to the people.
Among the powers granted to the federal government is what is known as the "Enclave Clause," which happens to be the 17th enumerated power. This clause provides authority for the federal government to exercise supreme authority over an area "ten miles square" ceded by the states to be the Capitol of the new government, and over any lands purchased from the states with the approval of the state legislature for "…the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings."
This is where it really gets sticky. Clearly, the designers intended for the federal government to purchase "with the approval of the legislature" any land to be owned by the federal government within any state. The Constitution empowers the federal government, however, to exercise sovereign authority over its territories, and the authority to add states which are carved out of the territories.
It is reasonable to conclude that when a state is carved out of a territory, it becomes a state subject to the powers and limitations of all the other states within the jurisdiction of the Constitution, and no longer subject to the federal authority suffered by the people when the land area was a territory.
This is pretty much the way it went when Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845. What was called "public land" was shifted to the state of Texas. Today, only 1.9 percent of Texas is owned by the federal government.
In Utah, however, the federal government required, as a condition of statehood, to "disclaim all right to title" of public land, and the feds retained nearly 60 percent of all the land in the state. In Nevada, the feds retained 85 percent of the land.
How can it be legal for the federal government to own land in a state that it did not purchase with the consent of the state legislature? How can it be legal for the federal government to exercise sovereignty over land within a sovereign state? Why were the eleven Western states and Alaska treated differently upon admission to the Union than were the other 26 states that joined the Union – when all states were supposed to be admitted on an "equal footing"?
There is only one logical conclusion: the federal government should not own the land it now claims within any state unless it is purchased with the approval of the state legislature for the purposes set forth in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17.
There is a growing effort in Western states to force the federal government to honor its Constitutional limitation on land ownership and return to the states that which is rightfully theirs.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Obama to Lock Up Public Lands from Being Used for Timber, Ranching, Mining and Energy Development
By William La Jeunesse, FOXNews.com February 18, 2010
More than a dozen pristine landscapes, wildlife habitats and scenic rivers in 11 Western states, some larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, are under consideration by the Obama administration to become America's newest National Monuments -- a decision the administration can make unilaterally without local input or congressional approval.
According to internal Department of Interior documents leaked to a Utah congressman and obtained exclusively by Fox News, the mostly public lands include Arizona deserts, California mountains, Montana prairies, New Mexico forests, Washington islands and the Great Basins of Nevada and Colorado -- totaling more than 13 million acres.
Sources say President Obama is likely to choose two or three sites from the list, depending on their size, conservation value and the development threat to each one's environment.
"Many nationally significant landscapes are worthy of inclusion in the NLCS (National Landscape Conservation System)," according to the draft report stamped NOT FOR RELEASE. "The areas listed below may be good candidates for National Monument designation and the Antiquities Act."
Presidential use of the Antiquities Act is highly controversial because the White House, with the stroke of a pen, can lock up thousands of square miles of federal lands used for timber, ranching, mining and energy development without local input or congressional approval. The Act is generally interpreted to commemorate or protect a specific historical landmark, not prohibit development or deprive local communities of jobs and tax revenues.
"Any federal action that could lead to limited access should be done in an open and public manner using extraordinary caution," said Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., upon seeing the leaked report. "The fact that this administration is already circulating internal memos to bypass Congress and the public process is troubling."
In 1996, President Clinton turned 1.3 million acres of southern Utah into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument without telling the Arizona or Utah congressional delegation. Highly controversial at the time, the designation has withstood numerous legal challenges to the president's authority, and the national monument remains one of Clinton's boldest environmental accomplishments.
While Western politicians are still digesting the report, several properties stand out.
-- Otero Mesa, New Mexico: The area stretches over 1.2 million acres and is home to 1,000 native species. Gov. Bill Richardson has sought protection for Otero Mesa for years, but the Bush administration targeted it for oil and gas development.
-- Heart of the Great Basin, Nevada: Researchers call it a "globally unique assemblage of cultural, wildlife and historic values" that includes thousands of petroglyphs and stone artifacts dating back 12,000 years.
-- Owyhee Desert, Oregon: Called one of the most remote areas of the United States, the Owyhee is home to the largest herd of California bighorn sheep.
-- Bodie Hills, California: Located in the fast growing eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, Bodie contains the Golden State's best preserved ghost town. But the area is also loaded with gold, and several mining permits are pending.
-- The Modoc Plateau, California: Spanning close to 3 million acres in the northwest corner of California, the Modoc Plateau is "laden with biological and archeological treasures." Interior officials call it the second largest unprotected landscape in the state.
The list contains a number of political land mines for the president, according to a former Bush Interior Department appointee familiar with the document who asked to remain anonymous.
"Right now a number of senior officials are going over the report," he told Fox News. "When Clinton did it, most of the West was red states and he didn't have any blowback. Obama has to ask himself, if he chooses a Nevada location, will it hurt (Senator Harry) Reid's re-election. The same is true in almost every (Western) state where Democrats have made serious inroads."
The list was leaked just days after a story appeared in the New York Times outlining the administration's plans to use executive power to advance his agenda in the face of congressional opposition.
"We are reviewing a list of presidential orders and directives to get the job done, across a front of issues," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the newspaper.
Western representatives are planning a full-fledged assault on the report when Congress returns from its break next week.
Congressman Rob Bishop, R-Ut., co-founder of the Western States Coalition and now Chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, has also seen the leaked memo.
"We are taking this seriously. The tar is warming up. The pitchforks are ready. We will do what ever we need to make sure Congress is fully informed and fully aware of this action. This process should be open and transparent and President Obama should go though Congress and do it this the right way, not by presidential fiat," said Bishop.
"Outrage. In a country as dependent on foreign oil as this one, this kind of action on public lands is simply unacceptable."
Interior Department spokesman Craig Leff told Fox News late Wednesday the leaked document "reflects some brainstorming discussions within [the Bureau of Land Management], but no decisions have been made about which areas, if any, might merit more serious review and consideration."
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Civil Forfeiture: Can States Seize Your Private Property?
I've never been convinced that the U.S. Supreme Court has any interest in actually defending the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Among other decisions "protecting" our freedoms, the Supreme Court has:
Upheld the power of state and local governments to seize private property from one group of people for the benefit of a more powerful private interest.
Upheld the power of the federal government to prohibit farmers from growing crops on their own land for their own consumption.
Upheld the right of the President to invalidate contracts calling for the settlement of debts in gold or other precious metal, rather than in fiat dollars.
I could go on and on, but the record is clear that for more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has systematically eviscerated the freedoms the Founding Fathers bestowed upon us.
For that reason, I'm not particularly optimistic about the prospects for the latest legal challenge to the horrific practice of "civil forfeiture" to reach the Supreme Court. (Civil forfeiture is a legal procedure in which prosecutors can seize your property without accusing you, much less convicting you, of any crime.)
The Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a law in Illinois that permits the State to seize someone's property without a warrant, and then indefinitely delay a hearing to determine whether there is probable cause to detain the property (Alvarez vs. Smith, Case No. 08-351).
My guess is that the Court will uphold the right of Illinois to simply seize your property and deny you any right to challenge the seizure in court. I make this prediction not only because of the Court's long record of upholding laws and regulations that destroy our rights, but because of a long line of decisions specifically upholding draconian civil forfeiture statutes.
In 1827, the Court confirmed that the government could confiscate your property in a civil forfeiture without a criminal conviction and that property of people entirely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever could be forfeited. In 1878, the Court again upheld the right of the government to seize property from an entirely innocent owner. It did so again in 1921 and then, to make sure we really got the point, made the same determination in 1996.
In 2000, Congress enacted a civil forfeiture reform statute that established an "innocent owner" defense for most federal civil forfeitures. But in forfeiture under state law, no innocent owner defense may be available. Even if it is available, in states like Illinois, the government may indefinitely delay legal proceedings to allow you to assert it.
Civil forfeiture is a legal abomination that has no place in a civilized society. A Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution and Bill of Rights as written wouldn't merely restrict civil forfeiture, but abolish it at all levels of government.
There's not a snowball's chance in a blast furnace that will happen in this case. The best we can hope for is that the Court will invalidate the Illinois law due to the ability of the state to effectively deny civil forfeiture victims the right to a hearing. And I'm not optimistic.
What do the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall, and Monticello have in common? The average American with a smattering of historical knowledge might say that those historic sites are all symbolic of America’s unique heritage of freedom.
Monticello, of course, was the home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence. That document (as well as the U.S. Constitution, later) was signed in Independence Hall. The Statue of Liberty memorializes the free nation under God that those founding documents created.
What about the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone Park, and the Grand Canyon? Well, these priceless natural resources are all managed by the U.S. National Parks Service. They are among the most frequently visited natural recreation areas in America, where millions of American families vacation every year.
Would it surprise you to learn that every one of these unique American landmarks is also controlled by the United Nations? It’s amazing but true. Every one of the natural and historic treasures listed above – plus more than a dozen more in America – has been designated an official World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is headquartered in Paris, France.
Sites included in the World Heritage program are considered to have “outstanding universal value” as part of our common world heritage.They are designated as protected areas under the 1972 World Heritage Treaty, which is itself an outgrowth of the 1968 UNESCO Biosphere Conference, where the currently ubiquitous concept of “sustainable development” first saw the light of day.
But, wait there’s more. There are 47 OTHER locations in America designated as UN Biosphere Reserves, which are vast parcels of land set aside for conservation and scientific study. Symbolized by the Egyptian ankh, the UN’s Man and Biosphere program is designed to help humans achieve a “balanced relationship with the natural world” - again, through “sustainable use”of natural resources.
What does this mean in real life? Well, nothing, if you believe the UN. “Biosphere Reserves have no international or other authority,” claims the website of the U.S. MAB program. Their list of common “myths” about MAB includes denials that the program results in any “loss of sovereignty” or threat to private property.
Others see it differently. Henry Lamb, executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International, says that the “Operational Guidelines” developed by the UN are effectively enforced by the U.S. government agencies managing the sites locally.
“Neither Congress, nor any state legislature, has ever voted to approve any of the 47 UN Biosphere Reserves in the United States. The management policy for millions of acres covered by these reserves is crafted by international committees of bureaucrats, none of whom is elected. To comply with ‘international obligations,’ the United States conforms its management policy and, in some cases, its law to accommodate the wishes of bureaucrats that are completely unknown to the people who are governed by the policies,” Lamb insists.
“This reality is but a hint of what is in store for those governed by the rule of international law. Massive documents, such as the 1140-page ‘Global Biodiversity Assessment,’ the 300-page ‘Agenda 21,’ and the 410-page ‘Our Global Neighborhood,’ all paint a picture of the international law that is being devised to govern the world in the 21st century.” (For more information visit http://www.eco.freedom.org/.)
Every Biosphere Reserve site consists of a protected CORE area, set aside strictly for conservation; a surrounding BUFFER ZONE, with limited human activity allowed; and a larger TRANSITION area, where otherwise legal human use may be severely restricted when the site is judged to be “in danger.”
For example, in 1995, Bill Clinton got the UN to declare Yellowstone Park a “World Heritage Site in Danger.”That gave him the “international obligation” to close down a coal mine on private property three miles away, despite the fact that coal had been mined in the area for 150 years before Yellowstone Park was created, and the Crown Butte Mines had won an award for excellence in 1992.
Today, Yellowstone Park is still considered to be “in danger,” according to the UN, because of “year-round visitor pressure.” Too many U.S. tourists taking their kids to see Old Faithful, the global bureaucrats in Paris say.
The President has the sole authority to approve these UN designations. Congress has no oversight, and average American citizens have no input. The House of Representatives has twice passed a bill requiring Congressional approval before any more precious pieces of America can be designated either Biosphere Reserves or World Heritage sites. So far, the Senate has refused to even bring the measure up for a vote.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still think Americans ought to control American land, not UNESCO bureaucrats. Why are both Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, allowing the UN to wield this kind of influence inside our nation’s borders? U.S. taxpayers should be outraged!
By Sean Flynn, Parade.com Originally Published on August 6, 2006
Joy and Carl Gamble bought an English stucco house in Norwood, Ohio, in 1969. They raised two children there and worked seven days a week in their small grocery store to pay off the mortgage.
“We had the house fixed up just the way we liked it,” Carl says. “When we retired, we planned to sit down and enjoy it.”
But now the Gambles live in their daughter’s basement. Their house stands vacant in the weedy field that was their neighborhood—seized by the city and transferred to a developer who wants to build shops, offices and condominiums.
In Long Branch, N.J., Denise Hoagland, 39, has an endless view of the Atlantic Ocean from the cottage she and her husband, Lee, bought 13 years ago. Their garden blooms with so many flowers that their three daughters call home “the place where the butterflies fly.” But Long Branch wants to take their home and about 35 other properties so a developer can build luxury condos.
Technically, it is a forced sale, because the government has to pay for the property. And it is legal: In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments can seize homes to make way for private development.The decision inKelo v. City of New London triggered a sort of government land-grab.
In the one year since Kelo, more than 5,700 homes, businesses and even churches were threatened with seizure for private development, according to the nonprofit Institute for Justice (IJ), and at least 350 were condemned or authorized for condemnation. By comparison, about 10,000 were similarly threatened or taken over from 1998 through 2002.
Government always has had the power to force the sale of private property for public use—a process known as eminent domain. But what is “public use”?
Historically, it meant highways, railroads, schools and sweeping urban-renewal projects, such as the redevelopment of the Baltimore waterfront. But Kelo made clear that middle-class homes could be replaced with malls, offices, luxury homes—anything that might increase tax revenue.
“It’s a blatant example of reverse Robin Hood—taking homes from the poor and the middle-income and giving them to the rich,” says Scott Bullock, the IJ attorney who argued (and lost) Kelo.
“The fact is, a shopping mall does usually produce more taxes than a house,” says IJ attorney Dana Berliner. “An office building does produce more taxes than a church. But if that’s the rule—that anyone’s home can be taken away from them because something else will produce more taxes—then no one’s home is safe.”
In Norwood, the Gambles and two other property owners represented by IJ brought their case to the Ohio Supreme Court. In Long Branch, two dozen residents, also working with IJ, are suing to stop their neighborhood from being replaced with 185 condominiums. And in Lakewood, Ohio, my hometown, the people of Scenic Park waged such a successful public campaign three years ago that voters spared their homes from being taken.
In each city, the process unfolded almost identically: A private developer, with the government’s backing, wanted a big piece of property—cliff-side homes with valley views in Lakewood, ocean-front cottages in Long Branch—and tried to negotiate deals with each owner.When some refused to sell, the cities threatened to invoke eminent domain to clear the holdouts.
In order to do that, however, city officials first needed to declare the neighborhoods “blighted.” But the legal designation of “blight” bears little resemblance to a commonsense definition. In Lakewood, for example, Scenic Park is a charming neighborhood of older, well-kept homes. But because they lack such modern touches as attached two-car garages and central air-conditioning, the city deemed them blighted—a standard by which more than 80 percent of Lakewood, even the former mayor’s home, would likewise be blighted.
“We always bit on the word ‘blight,’” says Julie Wiltse, 63, who helped neighbors distribute 20,000 fliers and sponsor a series of blight events: a Blighted Block Party, a Blighted Chili Cook-off, even a Blighted Groundhog Day (which predicted four more months of blight). TV cameras and newspaper reporters loved that stuff.
“We were very successful in explaining to the community, ‘If we’re blighted, you’re blighted,’” Wiltse says.
Likewise, the Hoaglands’ neighborhood in Long Branch isn’t “blighted” in any meaningful way. With one or two exceptions, it’s a few blocks of low-key bungalows where families have lived side-by-side for decades, even generations. The shabbiest touches, ironically, are the posters in nearly every home’s windows with the words “eminent domain abuse” inside a red-slashed circle and the several homes that have been bought by the developer and boarded up. What the area doesn’t have, however, are the $500,000 condos or the restaurants with $12 hamburgers that were built immediately south of the neighborhood.
“When they want to revitalize,” says William Giordano, 41, whose great-grandfather built his house, “suddenly we’re not good enough to live here.”
The city has put prices on the houses it wants to take: $400,000 for the Hoaglands’ house, $374,000 for Lori Ann Vendetti’s, $410,000 for the home her parents built across the street and $325,000 for Anna DeFaria’s tiny gray cottage. Those might sound like hefty sums, but not on the Jersey shore.
“ I can’t get anything in Long Branch for three and a quarter,” DeFaria says, “let alone an ocean view.”
But what’s money?
“The memories are here,” says Lori Ann Vendetti. “They can come in with a million dollars, two million—we won’t take it. A lot of people think we’re bluffing, that everyone has a price. The Vendettis don’t have a price.”
Neither do the Gambles. Most of the properties that the Gambles and their Norwood neighbors owned—69 out of 75—were sold to the developer, who was required by the city to pay at least 25 percent above market value. Three others later settled with the developer. Then the city used eminent domain to claim the last three, concluding that the neighborhood was deteriorating, based on a study that was paid for by the developer.
Tim Burke, a lawyer for the city, argues that the government had to clear the holdouts, especially because there were so many other property owners who had agreed to sell. “Would Norwood have used eminent domain if it had to acquire 69 of the properties? Clearly not,” he says.
As Burke explains it, Norwood is an old industrial town that lost its industry and a third of its population. The city needs to redevelop to generate new revenues, and clearly most of the Gambles’ neighbors weren’t opposed.
“When you’re a community like Norwood, you’ve got to be concerned with the entire citizenry,” Burke says. “And, yeah, there are going to be instances where, in order to better the lives of the many, the property of the few will have to be taken.”
But what if you’re one of those few?
“That this is happening here,” says Joy Gamble, “in the land ‘ of the people, for the people, by the people…’” The thought trails off, and she just shakes her head.
Most of the world's people have no concept of private property, as it has evolved in the United States.
Most of the world evolved under a system of governance in which the state (king, czar, crown prince, or whatever) owned all the land and all the resources.Individuals are granted (or denied) the privilege of using the land and its resources only as it may please the state.
This underlying philosophy of land use continues to permeate public policy throughout most of the world, and especially in the United Nations.
This philosophy was rejected by the people who created the government of the United States, choosing instead, the philosophy of John Locke, who championed individual ownership.
This principle of private property ownership is the foundation from which America's prosperity was launched.
The principle of private property ownership was challenged in the United States during the 1930's enthusiasm for socialism, through organizations such as the Wilderness Society, whose founder, Robert Marshall, advocated "nationalization" of the nation's forests. The post-war anti-communism campaign quieted this enthusiasm in America, but did not end it.
Advocates of government ownership and control of land use saw more opportunity in a global approach than was offered by the cumbersome American legislative system. Proponents of this philosophy flocked to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a non-government organization founded by Julian Huxley, who also was the founder of UNESCO - the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
A Frenchman, Francois Bourliere, was president of the IUCN from 1963 to 1966. He, personally, and the IUCN were instrumental in the development of the first U.N. Treaty on Wetlands, adopted in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. Bourliere was named to chair the first MAB International Coordinating Council in November 1971. From this meeting grew the current U.N. Man and the Biosphere Program.
In 1973, in Washington, the IUCN was successful in getting the U.N. to adopt its treaty onEndangered Species. The IUCN was responsible for drafting, and bringing into force through the United Nations, a global policy on governing wetlands, endangered species, and biosphere reserves.
By 1976, the United Nations was ready to articulate a general policy on land use. This policy is stated in the final report of the first U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (HABITAT I), held in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1976.
The preamble to the section on Land, says:
"Land... cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interests of society as a whole. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable ..."
The land use philosophy of the non-American world was fully incorporated into international law and norms, with the support of the United States government.At the direction of President Carter, the U.S. State Department entered into an agreement with UNESCO in 1979 to launch a U.S. Man and the Biosphere Program. Congress was not consulted, nor was any state legislature consulted, as 47 U.N. Biosphere Reserves were quietly designated in the United States.
In the late 1990s, the 48th U.N. Biosphere Reserve was proposed for the Ozarks. The U.S. MAB office, working through other federal and state agencies and The Nature Conservancy, began the initiative. It failed because local citizens informed themselves about the possible implications and insisted to their elected officials that the designation be stopped.
Congressman Don Young (R-AK) introduced the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives in two sessions of Congress, but died in the Senate. His bill would have required that Congress approve each of the existing Biosphere Reserves and all future designations.
Proponents of government control of land use shifted their tactics from the expansion of Biosphere reserves to other land use control measures. The Clinton administration adopted an Ecosystem Management Policy, and used the Antiquities Act to designate "Monuments" so expansive as to give government control of land well beyond the so-called monument. The "Roadless Initiative" had the effect of removing people from wilderness areas by denying access. This was much easier that getting a wilderness designation through Congress.
The"Clean Water Initiative"gave the federal government jurisdiction over private lands adjacent to streams, broadening the scope of the earlier "wetland" policy.Heritage designations, conservation easements, and "open space" are now favorite tools used to expand government control of land use.
"Critical Habitat" authorized under the Endangered Species Act, has become a favorite device for government control of private property. Nearly 2,000 species have been listed as endangered or threatened; government has only to declare an area to be "critical" to the species, then the government can dictate how the land may be used.
All of these measures work together to achieve the original goal of the Man and the Biosphere Program:"to conserve most of the planet for wildlife, forcing people into "sustainable communities." This objective has now been codified into international law in the form of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The IUCN, author of this concept, also devised Agenda 21, adopted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 at the U.N. conference on Environment and Development. Agenda 21 is a laundry list of recommendations designed to reorganize society around the central principle of protecting the environment.
Even though the U.S. Senate chose not to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, and Congress has never voted to approve Agenda 21, the federal government has been implementing both. The Forest Service is actively developing "corridors" to connect wilderness areas. Bill Clinton created the President's Council on Sustainable Development to translate Agenda 21 into domestic policy.
Why is the government using every excuse it can muster to grab the land of private individuals?The government cannot implement the international agenda if individuals are allowed to do what they please with their own land.
The European socialist philosophy on land use has overwhelmed the philosophy of John Locke and America's founders. It is no longer called socialism. It is called by many names, all associated with "sustainable development."
In most communities, neither the victims, nor the proponents of sustainable development are aware that their plight is a part of a global agenda. Indeed, most would scoff at the idea. Nevertheless, the transformation of America is well underway, without public debate, or Congressional approval.
From watershed, to ecosystem, to village, to city, to multi-county regions, to transboundary biospheres - the U.N. agenda is being systematically implemented - with the help of elected officials, paid for with the taxes of American citizens.
The cap and trade or climate bill is an extension of the United Nation’s Agenda 21 — the globalist plan to “manage, count, and control all of the world’s assets. Included are the forests, fresh water, agricultural lands, deserts, pastures, rangelands, farmers’ fields, oceans and inland waterways, marine environment, marine life, cities, housing, sewer and solid wastes, methods of production, air, pollution, biotechnology — every aspect of living and farming, production and manufacturing, research and medicine, etc., along with you and I.” - Joan Veon
August 19, 2009
USA TODAY - New forests would spread across the American landscape, replacing both pasture and farm fields, under a congressional plan to confront climate change, an Environmental Protection Agency analysis shows.
About 18 million acres of new trees — roughly the size of West Virginia — would be planted by 2020, according to an EPA analysis of a climate bill passed by the House of Representatives in June.
That's because the House bill gives financial incentives to farmers and ranchers to plant trees, which suck in large amounts of the key global-warming gas: carbon dioxide.
The forestation effort would be even larger than one carried out by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, says the U.S. Forest Service's Ralph Alig. The CCC, which lasted from 1933 to 1942, planted 3 billion trees, says the Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy, an alumni group for workers and family members.
The environmental benefits are clear. More trees would not only lower carbon dioxide levels, but they would improve water quality, because they need lower levels of pesticides and fertilizers, says agricultural economist Bruce McCarl of Texas A&M University, who contributed to the EPA analysis.
The plan would, however, be hard on ranchers and farmers and potentially food prices, says American Farm Bureau chief economist Bob Young.
In the Senate, which is likely to consider a similar bill this fall, there are some who worry the loss of farmland would lead to increases in food prices worse than those seen in mid-2007, when costs spiked 7% to 8% above 2006 levels.
If those food prices seemed high, "wait till you start moving agricultural acres into climate-change areas," warns Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., Agriculture secretary for President George W. Bush.
McCarl says food costs would stay roughly the same.
The latest EPA analysis does not say where the farmland would be lost. However, an EPA study done in 2005 that analyzed climate-change policies similar to the House bill found that trees would overgrow farms primarily in three areas:
•Great Lake states: Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
•The Southeast: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
•The Corn Belt: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio.
Forests once grew there, says study author Brian Murray of Duke University, so trees would sprout quickly in those areas if farmers got financial incentives. The House climate bill would allow landowners who reduce carbon dioxide to sell carbon permits to polluters, such as power plants.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week hailed the possibility that climate-change action could help forests.
"We have our own deforestation problem right here in the U.S. of A," he said. "Just keeping forest as forest is a significant challenge."
Roughly 1 million acres of forests every year were flattened to make way for homes and other development in the 1990s, Alig says. Without a climate bill, a net total 26 million acres of forest will be lost to development by 2050, he says.
By Tom Deweese, American Policy Center Originally Published on March 25, 2008
Which do you choose? A way of life where you are the master of your destiny, or one where virtually all decisions are made for you by one ruling body or another? It’s the classic struggle facing every human on earth. Freedom or control.
Truth be known, there are many who actually choose control. It makes for a well-ordered society with few surprises.
In a controlled society, one doesn’t have to make complicated career choices, health care is provided.
Community planners decide where housing will be placed. Committees decide what industries are to be allowed and how they will operate. Self-appointed watchdogs decide the foods that you shall be permitted to eat, to protect our health, of course.
Family planners decide the number of children allowed and how they will be raised. Those children, of course, will be well taken care of every day in public education centers that not only provide a centrally planned curriculum, but also provide for all physical and mental health needs.
Crime can be eliminated in the coming Utopia because there will be no real possessions or personal property to steal and no personally-owned weapons to threaten the authority of the State. Economic security is promised in a better world as everyone equally sacrifices their earned wealth to the State so all may live in harmony, free of greed and the stress of daily living. Everything is well organized, peaceful and controlled. Everyone is secure in the knowledge that tomorrow will be just like today.
On the other hand, there is the chaos of what some call freedom. In such a society, people are fully responsible for their own actions.
Untethered individuals throw a monkey wrench into a well-ordered society by inventing new gadgets that make life easier and more productive, but threaten old ways.
“Selfish” people pursue their own dreams and ideals without ever worrying about how they fit into the order created by the State. They want to benefit from the fruits of their labor, own property, and raise families without controls established from the wisdom of the community.
Imagine such a society in which parents get to decide how best to educate their children. And think of the irresponsibility of individuals actually being able to choose if and how they want to invest their money to prepare for retirement.
In the so-called free society, people eat what they want without benefit of government approval. Children are part of the family that bore them, not overseen by the State. People start enterprises without asking permission. Nothing stays the same, except that individuals are secure in their homes and have the ability to live their lives as they choose.
Control today has a name: “Agenda 21.” This is the name of a policy document first unveiled at the United Nations’ Earth Summit in 1992. Implementation of the treaty is through a policy called Sustainable Development.
This program is now the official policy of the United States and is being systematically imposed in every single state of the Union and in every city and town. There are very few exceptions.
Sustainable Development is no less than a ruling principle through which decisions for all aspects of our lives are determined through public/private partnerships between government (at all levels) and private institutions in our communities.
They provide guidelines to determine business decisions, property use, medical care, education curriculum, foreign policy, economics, taxes, labor policy, career decisions, housing, building material, farming policy, and much more.
Agenda 21 is based on the principle that government is the maker of rights.
If you choose freedom, then there is a counter to Agenda 21 and its Sustainable Development program. It’s called Freedom 21, and it’s quickly growing into a “freedom movement.” Freedom 21 is not an organization. It is a loose coalition of groups and individuals who believe that our nation’s Founding Fathers had it right when they established this nation as one with tightly controlled reins on government.
The Founding Fathers believed that all individuals were born with their rights of individual liberty, and that government’s job is to protect those rights as individuals pursue their own dreams and goals.
"[Communism] is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communists vision is the vision of man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world." [Whittaker Chambers, "Witness," p.9.]
These Ten Planks are the hallmark of a Communist Government. You will see that ALL but ONE have been completely implemented in the U.S. Government. And that ONE remaining “plank” is soon to be completed.
Graduated Income Tax - Established in America in 1913.
Rights of inheritance government controlled – the U.S. government Inheritance Tax
Central Bank – the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank
Government ownership or control of communications and transportation - FCC and Department of Transportation
Government ownership or control of factories and agriculture – through the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture
Government control of labor – U.S. Department of Labor
Corporate farms and regional planning/U.S. control of factory farming – three large corporations own virtually ALL the farmland and production facilities in the U.S.
Regional governments are being appointed (NOT elected) and have significant power and control, but are not beholden to the voters.
Federal Government control of education – U.S. Department of Education (with National achievement tests and Federal government control of curriculum). This was NEVER to be the case in the U.S.A. It is unconstitutional.
Confiscation of property of rebels – the local police departments are confiscating property if marijuana is found being grown on the property, they are confiscating and selling cars of those stopped for highway infractions, they are confiscating the property of those who disagree with the government on the war or income tax.
Abolition of private property – For years, the government has had the doctrine of eminent domain through which they can condemn your property for a freeway or other public road. Now they have extended this eminent domain to include the confiscation of your property if your city wants to build a hotel or other building on your property to increase their tax revenue.
They can also abolish private property just by raising your taxes higher than you can pay. They then confiscate your property for non-payment of property tax.
The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution limits the federal power of eminent domain solely to the purchase of private property with just compensation for public use, such as military reservations and government office buildings - not for public ownership, such as urban renewal, environmental protection, or historic preservation. Under no circumstances may the federal government take private property, by means of rules and regulations which preclude or substantially reduce the productive use of the property, even with just compensation.
Our Founding Fathers knew that to preserve this land of liberty, the individual citizen had to have rights even the government could not take away. Most precious of those rights is the ability to own and use private property. From that right, all others are secured.
Citizens for a Constitutional Republic call for a return to the states and to the people all lands which are held by the federal government without authorization by the Constitution.
We also call for repeal of federal wetlands legislation and the federal Endangered Species Act. Moreover, we oppose any attempt to designate private or public property as United Nations World Heritage sites or Biosphere reserves. We call for an end to United States participation in UN programs such as UNESCO, Man and the Biosphere, and the UN Council on Sustainable Development. We oppose environmental treaties and conventions such as the Biodiversity Treaty, the Convention on Climate Control, and Agenda 21, which destroy our sovereignty and right to private property.
