We really need a regional planning authority for the Bay Area, with the power to override local zoning boards, exercise eminent domain, and with an enormous budget for building mass transit.
Politically, I think the only way to get there is to wait for the Big One. Plate tectonics has become the best hope for urbanism in northern California.
And it's really the only way to overcome NIMBYism. Don't want a power line running through your land? Don't want light rail a half block away? Too bad, here it comes.
Some kind of democratically elected board of soulless government bureaucrats. Basically the same configuration as makes the decisions now, except on a regional rather than community scale.
The point is not to remove accountability, but to prevent small municipalities from having veto power on things that would vastly improve people's quality of life regionwide (like a BART line to Marin, for example).
Yeah, not saying it's right, just that it is how things get done. Usually the people who get screwed on compensation are the ones who hold out and fight.
There was a homeowner in Denver who refused to sell to make way for Coors Field who got what he was originally offered, minus all the money spent on legal fees fighting it.
Power lines, airports, highways, rail lines, sure. Stadiums, outlet malls, casinos, not so much.
It's hard to define "just compensation" as anything other than a market price, meaning the price that a buyer and seller agree upon when the buyer isn't "negotiating" using the threat of force.
I have no dog in this fight. I’m just responding to the comment “If you want the land, pay for it.” which makes it sound like land is seized with no compensation.
What makes you think market prices are just? This might not be an easy problem to solve, but it's not an impossible one either. ED would be used when people are unwilling to sell. If you can buy 20 plots of land from people willing to sell for price X and then the two hold outs who are unwilling to sell have to EDed, you know perfectly well what just compensation is.
This is a perfect case where leaving it to the market does not generate the most welfare or the most just outcomes. A form of rent seeking behaviour.
Except in a fair market, if a developer managed to get all but a couple holdouts, those remaining would likely be able to command higher prices as they would have leverage. ED robs then of the extra money they could have made, and it can be considerable.
There's an obvious defect in that approach. The incentive there is to delay the transaction as long as possible. Worst case scenario, the public project fails and you keep your stuff.
It's certainly imperfect, especially when it's used for stadiums or other private purposes. But even then -- At least it's an open, public process and not some secretive thing that puts neighbor against neighbor.
I don't mean to make some grand moral claim about markets always being "just." My point is that a buyer who gets to force someone to sell AND gets to choose the price they must sell at is VERY far from my intuitive (yet admittedly ill-defined) feelings about justice.
In your example, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that one person may value their land much more than their 20 neighbors value their own lands. Perhaps the one plot of land has been in the family for generations and has immense sentimental value. Perhaps the one landowner doesn't approve of the development project being pursued.
The value of my house to me is higher than what I could get for it on the market in part because I simply do not want to be bothered moving anytime soon.
"We really need a regional planning authority for the Bay Area, with the power to override local zoning boards, exercise eminent domain, and with an enormous budget for building mass transit."
Politically, I think the only way to get there is to wait for the Big One. Plate tectonics has become the best hope for urbanism in northern California.
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