Connecticut’s ‘New Urbanism’ faces crime, transit hurdles
Eminent domain is not a good tool for creating New Urbanism communities, said Jonathan Coppage, a visiting senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative. Coppage, who managed the magazine’s New Urbanism coverage for two years, moderated the Providence panel discussion.
“I’m very wary of eminent domain private development projects, in part precisely because of Kelo vs. New London,” he wrote in an email prior to the event. “While I’m certainly not a real estate lawyer, those sorts of big seize-and-plan projects are exactly the sort of thing more likely to fail than an open process that allows incremental development to organically rehabilitate a place.
“Public-private coordination is often necessary and eminent domain is, of course, a long-standing and explicitly constitutional tool available to governments, but it should be carefully constrained, and Kelo did ‘New Urbs’-type development no favors.”