OPINION

COMMENTARY: Casino agency abuses eminent domain

By Craig Westover

It is a case right out of Central Casting: the arrogant state agency that is abusing its power of eminent domain to take the family home of underdog Charlie Birnbaum, a local piano tuner who has deep roots to the property.

Charlie’s home is a 1921 three-story walk-up apartment building within sight of the ocean and Atlantic City’s famed boardwalk. Here Charlie and his brother grew up with his parents, Holocaust survivors who met while hiding from the Nazis in their native Poland. Here Charlie visited and cared for his aging parents. His father passed away in 1987. In 1998 his mother, then 86, was brutally beaten to death in the family home. Charlie, a piano prodigy who played with the Philadelphia Orchestra at 13 and a professional piano tuner for the casino industry, dealt with the tragedy by restoring the ground-floor apartment as a piano studio devoted to the memory of his parents.

“And that’s why this property has meant so much,” Charlie told Forbes Magazine. “It was my therapy.”

As Charlie is Central Casting’s perfect client, New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is the ultimate villain. Given authority by New Jersey law to acquire property for casino development, the CRDA is using the power of eminent domain to seize Charlie’s family home as part of a “mixed-use development” project to “complement” the recently bankrupt Revel casino, which announced this week that it would close down on Sept. 10.

The CRDA, however, has no concrete plans to do anything in particular with Charlie’s property — other than to acquire it and bulldoze his memories. You would think with the Revel’s closing, the CRDA would do the decent thing and abandon its plans to take Charlie’s home, but so far the authority continues to keeps its head firmly buried in the Atlantic City sand.

On May 2, Charlie filed papers challenging the CRDA’s unconstitutional attempt to seize his family home using eminent domain.

Situations like Charlie’s personalize and humanize the cost of government takings, but at stake are fundamental property rights that should be apparent to all, regardless of the character of the property owner or the ill, or even good, intentions of a government agency. Eminent-domain abuse affects the property rights of everyone. If Charlie’s home is taken now for no specific reason at all, your home or any home in New Jersey could well be next.

“Eminent domain has traditionally been understood as the power of government to take private property for a public use, like a courthouse or a public school — something the public would own and use,” said Institute for Justice Litigation Director Dana Berliner, who in the 1990s defeated the CRDA’s attempt to seize an elderly widow’s home and turn it over to Donald Trump for use as a limousine parking lot.

“But some state agencies, like CRDA, abuse eminent domain to take property for purely private development. There has been a nationwide backlash against this kind of eminent-domain abuse in recent years, and New Jersey courts have been among those to restrict the use of eminent domain, but New Jersey officials seem to be among the last to hear about it.”

Across New Jersey, and across the United States, local governments are using the power of eminent domain to seize private homes, businesses and farms in order to transfer property to other private owners for their private use. Governments often justify these private-to-private transfers by making bogus claims that the property is “blighted” and will be “redeveloped” by the new owner, creating more jobs and tax revenue.

This was the situation in Long Branch, where officials targeted as “blighted” modest homes with spectacular oceanfront views in a vibrant neighborhood because of “diversity of ownership,” meaning that each home was owned by a separate family. One would think in this nation that that would be a good thing, not a reason to lose the home you treasure.

The Institute for Justice represented the Long Branch homeowners who fought their city’s effort to forcibly take their homes and hand the land over to private developers. When homeowners successfully appealed a lower-court ruling that allowed the city to forcibly take their property, the city announced that it would drop the eminent-domain actions.

While Birnbaum’s battle to save his home from CRDA bulldozers ignites Americans’ sense of outrage, it’s important to remember the fundamental right of private property that is at stake. If the CRDA prevails in its notion that it has the authority to take any property it wants in Atlantic City, for any reason or no reason, at any time, whose home or business is safe?

Power of eminent domain is limited. CRDA power is limited. It’s time someone reminded them of it.

Craig Westover is a communications fellow with the Institute for Justice. For more information, visit www.ij.org/atlantic-city-eminent-domain.