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The eminent domain boogeyman has been holed up in my closet for a while, giving way to other important matters like that pesky war against radical jihad. Nevertheless, it’s an important issue that hasn’t been dealt with since SCOTUS ruled that this land is neither mine nor yours, but the governments.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court had essentially allowed cities to invoke the power of eminent domain to seize private property not for roads or schools, as is common practice, but for less noble purposes, such as indulging Biff McFranchiser’s discovery that your land is the ideal location from which to sell hamburgers. The cities, which would force you to sell at whatever “fair market” price they demanded on threat of condemnation, would get to keep the toy at the bottom of your Unhappy Meal, in the form of higher tax revenue. Biff, to the cities’ thinking, would generate more income for their coffers than you would by, say, having Pictionary parties or sitting on your couch watching TV.

. . .Piscataway (an Indian term meaning “it is getting dark”) was once a charming farm community. But like so much of America, it is now a charmless depot off the Turnpike, a 19-square-mile blur of box stores, strip malls, and high-density housing. In the middle of this, sprawled over 75 acres, sits the Halper farm, one of the last agricultural tracts in Piscataway.

. . .The township has made feints at taking the Halper property for decades. In 1975, it actually did force the Halpers to sell 25 acres, which Piscataway added to an adjoining park. But the current festivities got underway in earnest in 1998. Around that time, the city purportedly grew nervous that some of its last privately owned green space might fall into the hands of ghastly developers, the kind that are regularly found in bed with the local politicians, making New Jersey a notorious “pay to play” state. Take a ride around the perimeter of the Halper farm, and such concerns don’t seem to have plagued city planner consciences in the past, what with all the quaint mom ‘n’ pop operations like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Hollywood Tans that blanket the town like bad wall-to-wall carpeting.

From the look of things, plenty of people are making hefty profits selling Piscataway real estate off to the highest bidder. But to the city’s thinking, the Halpers shouldn’t be among them. They only worked the farm for nearly a century, why should they make money off it? Never mind that they’d received unsolicited offers for their land for decades and managed not to sell. Piscataway officials were coming after their property anyway, vowing to maintain it as “open space.” An incredulous Clements asks what could be “more ‘open space’ than a farm?”

eminent domain property rights Supreme Court