Redevelopment

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Update: we removed the embedded video that was posted above, since CBS kept replacing it with other clips. Here’s a direct link to the video.

As our readers know, we follow with keen interest events in the People’s Republic of China (does anyone call it that, anymore?), especially those issues related to property and a budding system of private rights. Here’s the latest from CBS’s venerable 60 Minutes, about the housing and real estate markets there. If true, it’s scary stuff, especially when you consider we live in a global economy, with so much of our goods supplied by the PRC.

China has been nothing short of a financial miracle. In just 30 years, this state-controlled economy became the world’s second largest, deftly managed by government policies and decrees.

One sector the authorities concentrated on was real estate and construction. But that may have created the largest housing…

Continue Reading 60 Minutes On China’s (Possible) Housing Bubble

Having recently attended the 7th International Conference of the Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights in Portland, Oregon, we offer this irreverent view of that city’s culture, “Insufferable Portland,” by Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard. The landscape he portrays should be familiar to anyone who knows Portland, Berkeley, the Upper West Side, Santa Monica, Boulder, Chapel Hill, or Ann Arbor. Some highlights:

Case in point: One of the most commented-on sketches from the show [Portlandia] is a scene from the first episode in which Armisen and Brownstein are sitting in a restaurant. After asking their waitress a series of absurd questions about whether the chicken they are about to eat is local​—​”the chicken is a heritage breed, woodland raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts. .  .  . His name was Colin, here are his papers”​—​the couple ends…

Continue Reading Portland: Planning Utopia Or Hipster Paradise?

On Tuesday, February 26, 2013 from 7:15 – 8:309 p.m. in Classroom #2, the University of Hawaii Law School is sponsoring a talk about “The PLDC and Property Rights in Hawaii,” which will feature our Damon Key colleague Mark M. Murakami.

PLDC refers to the Public Land Development Corporation, a state agency created in 2011 to develop state-owned lands, primarily in concert with private entities. As Honolulu Civil Beat‘s information page on PLDC notes:

The corporation has broad powers for entering into private partnerships and establishing its own governing objectives and policies. It also is tasked with identifying state lands under DLNR that are suitable for development. The Board of Land and Natural Resources must approve all land transfers.

The corporation, with the approval of the governor, can also issue revenue bonds for constructing, acquiring and renovating public facilities, as well as for the acquisition…

Continue Reading Upcoming Event: The PLDC and Property Rights in Hawaii

Mark your calendars: on Thursday, February 21, 2013, James Burling, director of the Pacific LegalFoundation and principal attorney at PLF’s Property Rights practice group and U. Hawaii lawprof Maxine Burkett willdiscuss “Do Property Rights Matter When The Environment IsGoing To Hell In A Handbasket?“

The forum — presented by the EnvironmentalLaw Program and the Federalist Society — will beginat 12:15 p.m. in CR1. Light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to elp@hawaii.edu.

More below.

Do Property Rights Matter When the Environment is Going to Hell in a Handbasket?


Continue Reading PLF’s Jim Burling To Discuss Property Rights And The Environment At U.H. Law School

What we’re reading today:

  • Grand Central Station and The Takings Clause – from the Constitutional Law Prof Blog, a link to a WNYC/NPR podcast about Grand Central Terminal and the Penn Central takings case. Worth listening, if only to hear the money quote near the end: “you see New Yorkers all the time staking claim in this building, pointing up at cerulean blue sky saying ‘hey, this belongs to us.'” Yes, we guess it does. And you know what? You didn’t pay for it.
  • Another one about the 100th anniversary of Grand Central: Gideon Kanner writes Calling All Grand Central Junkies!, linking to the NY Times‘s republication of its 1913 special celebrating the opening of the terminal.
  • In that vein, a snarky commentary about the wonders of Pennsylvania Station. Who needs a cerulean blue sky?
  • In what reads more like a redeveloper’s press release, the Washington Post

…
Continue Reading Wednesday Round-Up: Grand Central, Oysters No More, And Originalist Takings

Didn’t the California Supreme Court already deal the final blow to California’s redevelopment agencies when it held that the state legislature could eliminate redevelopment agencies without violating the California Constitution because what the lege giveth, the lege may taketh away? In California Redevelopment Association v. Matosantos, No. S194861 (Dec. 29, 2011) the court upheld the statute dissolving redevelopment agencies.

Apparently, however, there are residual issues. In 2009, “the Legislature enacted Assembly Bill No. 26, requiring redevelopment agencies throughout the state to contribute portions of their property tax increment funding for the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 fiscal years into supplemental educational revenue augmentation funds (SERAF‘s) to be used for financing K-12 education in redevelopment areas.” As a result, redevelopment agencies were forced to transfer funds to the state general fund to offset other state-funded local programs.

In the latest case, California Redevelopment Ass’n v. Matosantos, No. C064907 (Cal. App. Jan…

Continue Reading Cal App: If Lege Can Eliminate Redevelopment Agencies, It Can Grab Redevelopment Money Too

This morning at the ALI-CLE Eminent Domain and Land Valuation Conference, we made a presentation (along with Cornell lawprof Robert Hockett and moderator Jim Burling) on the issue of the use of eminent domain to seize “underwater” mortgages.

Late breaking: it must have been something we said – the Joint Powers Authority (the agency formed by San Bernardino County and two county municipalities to study the issue) today announced it would not use eminent domain to take underwater mortgages, noting that “the group decided to give up on the idea due to a lack of public support. ‘We are taking that off the table,’ [the chief executive and chairman of the JPA] said Thursday.”

Here’s the video we mentioned, an interview with the chairman of Mortgage Resolution Partners for the views from the outfit that stands to benefit from the use of using eminent domain to take underwater mortgages.

Continue Reading Materials And Links From Today’s ALI-CLE Presentation On Condemnation Of Underwater Mortgages

If you have followed the Atlantic Yards eminent domain abuse fight (so well captured in the docfilm Battle for Brooklyn), you know there are a handful of blogs that chronicle the situation in real time, often with great passion.

We checked in today with one of the leading blogs, noLandGrab today, only to find out that back in November it published its last post because, according to the New York Times, it was time “to hang up the keyboard.” See “Opponents of Atlantic Yards Are Exhausted by a Long, Losing Battle.” Continue Reading No Land Grab Blog Rides Off Into The Sunset

You know how we’re always saying that certain parties have an enviable record of success in the Hawaii Supreme Court? Well, now the statistics are official.

The latest edition of the University of Hawaii Law Review published an article by lawprof David Callies summarzing the decisions of the court during the tenure of now-retired Chief Justice Ronald Moon. The article sets forth the stark numbers (83% win rate, 65% reversal of the intermediate appellate court), and contains a sharp comment about the often-lengthy nature of the court’s opinions:

Second, the Moon Court decided some of thestate’s most important property and related environmental and Native Hawaiianrights cases in favor of the various non-governmental organizations bringingthem (Sierra Club, Earthjustice, Hawaii’s Thousand Friends, and the NativeHawaiian Legal Corporation) approximately eighty-two percent of the time,sixty-five percent of which reversed the Intermediate Court of Appeals (ICA).Third, the court increasingly rendered lengthy opinions, many triple the…

Continue Reading U.H. Lawprof: HAWSCT’s 1993-2010 Record On Private Property Rights “Appalling”

Our friend Paul Schwind has been keeping us up to date on the progress, vel non, of the federal legal challenge to the Honolulu rail project. Paul’s most recent update was on the remedy hearing, and today he provides us with a breakdown of yesterday’s short ruling on the remedy the court is imposing for the violations of section 4(f) of the Transportation Act Next step the Ninth Circuit?

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Honolulu Rail Remedy – Phasers On Minimal

by Paul J. Schwind*

The multi-billion dollar Honolulu rail project has been onlyminimally stunned by the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii for itsfailure to adequately study the project’s possible effects on Chinatown and MotherWaldron Park (an old urban park/playground), and for its failure to articulatethe reasons why a tunnel under Beretania Street (a major city arterial) wasrejected.

Yesterday, the court issued its Judgment and Partial Injunction in Honolulutraffic.comv.

Continue Reading Guest Post: Honolulu Rail Remedy – Phasers On Minimal