Another kind of thing that eminent domain can get used for that is particularly pernicious is that it can used to change the racial constitution of an area. There have been a couple of situations like that. There was one in Chicago where there was a whole area that was primarily a nice middle-class area, primarily populated by Hispanic people, and the city tried to just condemn the whole thing to turn it into condominiums. There is another situation going on right now in Pittsburgh where they are proposing changing the entire downtown. Right now it is a racially mixed sort of middle class-lower middle class shopping area, and they want to change it into a kind of shopping area that only very wealthy people and probably only ver white people are going to be going to, instead of the people that are currently shopping there.
Eminent domain is a power that can be gravely misused in lots of different kinds of ways.
And one of my purposes in being here is to suggest to you at least a few things that you can do when you have the opportunity to stop it. The first is fairly obvious. No government entity, or almost no government entity, should be having this power anymore. So if they are, if your town or your state is creating a new agency or redevelopment authority or economic development corporation or parking authority or county agency, anything, and there is a question about whether or not to give that agency the power of eminent domain, the answer is no, no, no. They should not have the power of eminent domain because once they have it, it is going to get misused.