California Voters Endorse Eminent Domain Abuse
Damon W. Root | June 4, 2008, 10:37am
Voters in California yesterday
overwhelmingly supported Proposition 99, a ballot measure that will significantly empower state and local officials to seize private property via eminent domain, and rejected Proposition 98, which would have protected property rights and ended rent control. As legal scholar Ilya Somin noted in the
Los Angeles Times, Proposition 99, though masquerading as a defense of private property, was actually sponsored by groups representing counties, cities, and other redevelopment interests who drafted it specifically to counter Proposition 98. Among other crimes, Proposition 99 will protect only owner-occupied residences from condemnation, leaving apartment buildings and other rental properties wide open for abuse. Moreover, as
Somin observed:
Even the protection for homeowners covered under Proposition 99 is likely to be ineffective, because the measure allows the condemnation of owner-occupied homes if they are "incidental" to a "public" project. This means that homes could still be taken for transfer to private developers if the proposed project allocated some space for a "public" facility such as a community center or library.
Proposition 98, on the other hand, would have placed significant limits on such abuse. But while that might have gone over with the voters, ending rent control was far less popular, even though the law would only affect rent controlled apartments once they became vacant, thus leaving current tenants unaffected. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came out against Prop. 98, however, claiming it "would undermine California's ability to improve our infrastructure."
Finally, as the Pacific Legal Foundation's Timothy Sandefur
has warned, Prop. 99 will "make things far worse not only by providing fake protection, but because the courts would interpret it as meaning that Californians did not want more serious protections for property rights."
James Anderson Merritt | June 4, 2008, 6:08pm | #
I had a five minute discussion with my (one-year-away-from-voting) son about props 98 and 99 as he accompanied me on the way to the polling place yesterday.
I explained to him that the core of Prop 98 was to say that the government could not appropriate property or the use/ownership of it to reassign the appropriated benefit to a private party; that all such appropriations were to be for the government to use directly for public purposes and facilities.
One implication (which was also made explicit in the proposition text) was that rent control would be abolished because it constrained the landlord's ownership/use of the property to benefit private parties (the renters).
He understood this perfectly. I said that many people were uncomfortable with this, and free-market discipline couldn't work correctly to minimize rents unless we also addressed issues of zoning and the construction permit process, but that I felt it would be better to pass part of the solution and work on the rest than to go the wrong way, which where I felt Prop 99 was headed.
I then went on to explain that the Prop 99 campaign was actually funded in large part with TAX REVENUES by a consortium of local government groups (as shown in recent reporting by the OC Register and others). This is about as illegal and unethical as it gets, yet the Prop 99 folks had the gall to say that Prop 98 and its campaign were "deceptive," not fully informing the public of the anti-rent-control provision. In fact, anyone who spent two minutes reading the official voter pamphlet, WHETHER THEY READ THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE MEASURE OR NOT, would have understood the main aspects of 98 including the rent-control angle. The only way that the Prop 98 campaign could be considered "deceptive" was to assume that people got their voting info ONLY from word-of-mouth and 30-second ads on TV. Any such voters wouldn't deserve the franchise, in my opinion. On the other hand, the Prop 99 guys kept trotting out oldsters and other disadvantaged folks, who alleged that their rent-control would end and they would be kicked out of their homes if Prop 98 passed. Again, reading the ballot pamphlet for just a handful of minutes makes clear that anyone now enjoying rent-control would continue to do so until they moved elsewhere. So the claims that people would be tossed into the street were indeed deceptive, if not out-and-out lies.
Finally, 99 contained a nullification provision, such that if it won by a bigger margin than 98 did, it would cancel 98. The 99 campaign spent a lot of time and effort to instruct people to vote for 99 as a fail-safe way of defeating 98, when the prudent voter might have otherwise voted "no" on each, as an invitation to the partisans to come back with something better in a future election. Instead, we are now stuck with goofy faux-reform of eminent domain.
As a renter, someone from the "baby boom" generation who is NOT lucky enough to own a home in his home region of the country, I am disgusted with this outcome. I wonder how many native Californians (or "immigrants" of longstanding) voted with the majority. This smacks of "transient/transplant" self-interest and/or irrationality.
It is clear that we have a lot of work to do, to dispel the "rent control is good" meme. But we really need to do it, or we're likely to get more garbage like Prop 99 in the future. Gad. I am so embarrassed for the State of my birth.
James Anderson Merritt | June 4, 2008, 6:21pm | #
Californian wrote,
"What Beb wrote above is exactly right. Practically everyone I know voted no on 98 because of the rent control provision, and yes on 99 to "Stop Eminent Domain" (none of them bothered to read either proposition).
"As to the propaganda: There were a few television / radio spots, but nothing overwhelming. Locally though, there were yes on 99 and no on 98 signs everywhere in my neck of the woods. It was also just about impossible to go in to any store without someone proselytizing about the evils of prop 98 / virtues of 99 for the last couple of months."
I got a bitter laugh out of watching a recent "duckspeak moment" at a recent Supervisoral candidate's forum here in Santa Cruz, where the incumbent came to the point of addressing eminent domain and rent control, and concluded with, "So we have to vote YES on 98 and NO on 99."
There was an awkward pause, while some arch-liberal supporters of this candidate in the audience explained that she had gotten it exactly backwards, that the politically correct thing to do was vote NO on 98 and YES on 99. She recovered and went right on, saying that this was an example of how complicated the issue and the ballot proposition situations were. Ha ha ha, moving on...
My God. If our elected officials (incumbents re-elected at least once!) don't know enough about the key issues or the matters we are supposed to be deciding, and if they can't maintain the presence of mind to keep those issues sorted out at CANDIDATE FORUMS, why are they drawing $100K+ salaries? Why do we put them in charge of huge piles of tax revenue, not to mention our behavior?
Of course, this incumbent candidate won re-election yesterday with 70% of the vote -- about the vote percentage that Yes on Prop 99 and No on Prop 98 garnered locally, not-so-coincidentally enough. These voters definitely got the representation they deserved. Yessir.
