Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmmeur01 | Hacker News Reader

Eminent domain being “pretty much never used” is a bold face lie in the US.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt...

Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.

View on HN

I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.

That's so bizarre. In my country only the government can force you to sell them your land under eminent domain.

Insane that in the US, companies can use eminent domain as well.

Much of the activity stems from a disastrous Supreme Court ruling a couple decades ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

A lot of farmland and lovely homes have been unprotected since. Many Americans wish for this case to be revisited (if they know about the case.)

While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.

Eminent domain for a public road is one thing. Forcibly taking land for a private company to make profits on is entirely different and not comparable. That is the part I object to the most.

> I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

The government should be able to take whatever land it needs for a highway, railway, etc. When we're talking about public infrastructure, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one landowner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com