John Norquist, chief executive officer of CNU, submitted

John Norquist, chief executive officer of CNU, submitted a “friend of the court” brief to the US Supreme Court, arguing that governments do not need the power of eminent domain to carry out economic development projects. Writing as an individual rather than spokesman for CNU, the former Milwaukee mayor supported the Washington, DC-based Institute for Justice and several small property owners in New London, Connecticut, who have asked the Court to rein in the use of eminent domain for “public benefit” such as economic development. The case, Kelo v. City of New London, is the most important eminent domain issue to reach the high court in decades. It involves nine individuals whose properties in a mixed-use, mostly working-class neighborhood were taken by the quasi-public New London Development Corp. (NLDC), which decided to clear a 90-acre area and have a developer put upscale housing, offices, a waterfront hotel, and other uses on it. NLDC is required to pay “just compensation” (fair market value), but Susette Kelo and the other property owners argued that the takings were unreasonable and unnecessary. Many planning and governmental organizations, including the American Planning Association and the National League of Cities, have come to NLDC’s defense, arguing that eminent domain is a tool that public agencies must have so that they can assemble land areas large enough for redevelopment in urban centers. Norquist argued that when a project of this sort makes financial sense, private interests can assemble the land without eminent domain. He noted that “in the mid-1980s, two West Palm Beach, Florida, developers discreetly assembled all of 26 contiguous blocks of a run-down inner city area by purchasing over 300 separate parcels from 240 different landowners in nine months (using twenty different brokers), and then convinced the city to approve a master plan for a mixed-use development, then dubbed ‘Downtown/Uptown.’” Several years later, under a different developer, the site became the new urban project CityPlace. Defenders of eminent domain countered that the original developers did not succeed — they lost their properties to foreclosure, and the city ultimately did use eminent domain to reassemble some of the properties.