Over 1,000 housing units and a new grocery store could be coming to San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood – but some San Francisco officials think they have better plans.
A former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is urging Mayor London Breed and the city to use eminent domain to freeze a new housing and commercial development on the space formerly occupied by Safeway, and instead seize the property to build the city’s vision of “affordable housing.”
The problem: it doesn’t work that way.
The Constitution allows governments to use eminent domain to take private lands for “public use,” like sewer infrastructure, new roads, schools or hospitals, in exchange for fair market value. Public use does not include having a slightly different vision for a housing development than a private owner.
California has a long history of abusing eminent domain power to transfer properties from one private owner to another, destroying homes and communities in the process. The Fillmore neighborhood itself was the victim of such eminent domain abuse in the 1960s, when the once-known “Harlem of the West” was razed for a redevelopment that never came.
Such destruction is unfortunately common: between 1998 and 2002 alone, California cities and redevelopment agencies condemned at least 223 individual properties for the benefit of private parties and have threatened at least another 635 with a promise of economic development, revenue, and jobs.
In 1989, Costa Mesa, California, cleared out several existing businesses through eminent domain to build Triangle Square Mall. The mall cost $62 million to build and promised a fresh take on retail shopping. In the years that followed, the mall struggled to hold onto tenants, maintaining a high vacancy rate. Former Mayor Sandra Genis, the lone dissenter to the project, put it well: “If the market was there, it would have happened on its own … It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people have other places to go to.”
Just a little further south, in 1988, the city of Indio, razed 94 homes in the predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood of Nobles Ranch for a failed mall expansion. By the 1980s, the Indio Fashion Mall had been steadily losing traffic to trendier spaces elsewhere. The Indio Redevelopment Agency stepped in, hoping to salvage the mall’s prospects by expanding southward and adding 100 stores. But the 23 acres the agency needed to expand the mall were not empty: the Indio Development Agency displaced over a dozen homeowners in favor of the promise of new jobs. The city destroyed homes, but recession complications meant the developer pulled out, and the mall was never expanded.
Failed developments like these cost taxpayers thousands of dollars, and cost homeowners and small business owners incalculable losses in the destruction of their homes and livelihoods. Simply put: governments do not make very good real estate speculators.
After the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. New London that cities could demolish private homes under the guise of “economic development,” most states strengthened their protections against eminent domain abuse. Today, California has some of the weakest protections for property owners, ranking a “D” on the Institute for Justice eminent domain scorecard.
San Francisco is in dire need of more affordable housing, but there are better ways to achieve those goals than unconstitutionally seizing land through government force. For example, the city could reform its zoning code, which is one of the most stringent, with two-thirds of its residential land being zoned for single-family only.
If San Francisco wants to focus on building affordable housing, seizing private property is not the way to do it.
Zoe Tishaev is an activism fellow at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that fights against eminent domain abuse.
