Take a walk downtown any evening, and the first thing that strikes you is the activity. The second thing that strikes you is that, amid all the restaurants, shops, and bars, there are still abandoned buildings and ugly parking lots.
The buildings aren’t really abandoned; they just look that way. They’re being held by trusts and investment groups, nearly all out of town. On Main Street across from Stone Street Plaza, the most active area of downtown, are buildings owned by a Toronto-based real estate company. They are boarded up, presumably until the day when rents will justify reopening them. The paradox, of course, is that boarded-up buildings are the biggest hindrance to the kind of dynamic activity that causes rents to go up.
When it comes to powerful words, two strike terror in the hearts of the kind of real estate investors who buy property to hold rather than develop: “eminent domain.” If your strategy is to let your property deteriorate until somebody comes along who will pay top dollar to develop, “eminent domain” are two words you never want to hear.
Eminent domain is embedded in English common law and enshrined in both the U.S. and Texas constitutions. The city has the right to take property for public use as long as it provides just compensation. In the 1954 case of Berman v. Parker, the U.S. Supreme Court defined “public use” as any “public purpose or public benefit.”
Hmmmm. Opening and restoring those boarded-up buildings sounds to me like a “public purpose” that would result in “public benefit.” But at Dallas City Hall, “eminent domain” is spoken in a whisper, as if the very mention will stir up rebellion among the masses. The fear of using a tool given by the Constitution reflects the fretful attitude of City Hall managers. They feel it is their job to obstruct and criticize other people’s plans, but when it comes to taking action themselves, you might as well wait until First Baptist opens a saloon on its first floor.
Other municipalities in our region are not so timid. Here are a few recent examples in which eminent domain was used to push a city’s agenda:
The only thing that these cases have in common is that none of them involved Dallas City Hall.
When it comes to eminent domain, Dallas is as timorous as a church mouse. An activist city attorney has used municipal ordinances to clean up strip clubs, but a weak city manager won’t invoke the city’s power to clean up downtown.
Other cities have circumvented their cumbersome city governments to form development corporations. Houston is a prime example: there aren’t any boarded-up buildings in downtown Houston unless they’re about to be demolished.
A public-private development corporation is currently being proposed for Dallas. By wrapping the current tax-financing districts into it, the development corporation would have the power of the purse. But nobody is talking about giving it the power of the baseball bat, and that’s a mistake. Carrots don’t work without sticks—and eminent domain is the one stick that property owners pay attention to.
I am often asked why I, a conservative Republican, so often call for our city government to take such an activist stance. My answer is that my libertarianism ends at the county line. The rugged individualist may be the myth that made America, but rugged individualists never built a city. A city is a commonwealth. What we build together, we enjoy together. Our goal is to build wealth, and by building wealth we increase the common good.
But there will always be those who hold out for a higher price or refuse to chip in their fair share or oppose for the sake of opposition. That’s why, long ago, we endowed government with certain powers. Among those powers is the power to take what it needs to increase the common wealth.
I came back from my walk around downtown with the strong conviction that eminent domain is a power Dallas needs to use. We should start now.
