It's more like a rape

Matt Labash, Weekly Standard, RCP. The Kelo takings continue in Piscataway, New Jersey:

As Clements says, "It's like if I steal a used car from you, then charge you for the repairs on the car. It's ridiculous." Keep in mind that the township condemned the Halper property not because of "blight"--a common reason offered for seizing property by eminent domain--but to preserve "open space," that is, make a park.

In other words, without officially claiming anything is wrong with the property, the city is helping itself to the product of three generations of Halper family labor--sub-freezing middle-of-the-night cow milkings when it was a dairy farm, year after vacationless year for Larry and Clara. The city vows that it's not selling their land off to developers, though literally every person I speak to in Piscataway doubts this, including those who don't support the Halpers. But so what if Piscataway doesn't resell the land? That means they're taking the Halper farm purely for aesthetic reasons--because it might look sorta pretty. Either way, they're taking it.

In New Jersey, Illinois' competitor for pay to play:

The Castle Coalition watchdog group has documented the most absurd eminent domain cases in the Garden State. In Carteret, the city wants to take the home of a World War II veteran dying of lung cancer, to give it to a luxury condominium developer. In New Brunswick, the city is trying to run off a local college bookstore owner who has owned his place for 33 years so that its redevelopment agency can build, among other things, another bookstore. In Union Township, a man who recently bought land to build townhouses on is being threatened by eminent domain so the township can turn the land over to another private developer who'll do exactly the same thing.

Clara:

Clara is nervous for their future. They've scouted property as far away as Arizona, but haven't found anything. Since they don't have a place, she's not even sure where the kids will be going to school, and its Zac's senior year. She has no hope of getting their ornamental trees back from the township. "They bulldozed the pin oaks and maples," she says.

She misses many things about their place, from their great room to "being outdoors, the fields, that oneness with nature. I miss the quiet, the peace, it was wonderful. It was our sanctuary." Still, they'd like to move on, but the township "won't let us, they won't pay us and cut the umbilical cord and let us move on. This is more than a taking, it's a vengeance. It's more like a rape. And it's repeated, over and over."