Court Opinion

ID: 9516957
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 23:57:37.645238+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:38:32.970315
License: Public Domain

Smith, J. (dissenting).
The good news from today’s decision is that our Court has not followed the lead of the United States Supreme Court in rendering the “public use” restriction on the Eminent Domain Clause virtually meaningless. The bad news is that the majority is much too deferential to the self-serving determination by Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) that petitioners live in a “blighted” area, and are accordingly subject to having their homes seized and turned over to a private developer. I do not think the record supports ESDC’s determination, and I therefore dissent.
I
Article I, § 7 (a) of the State Constitution says: “Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation.”
The words “public use” embody an important protection for property owners. They prevent the State from invoking its eminent domain power as a means of transferring property from one private owner to another who has found more favor with state officials, or who promises to use the land in a way more to the State’s liking. They do not require that all takings result in public ownership of the property, but they do ordinarily *547require that, if the land is transferred to private hands, it be used after the taking in a way that benefits the public directly. A recognized exception permits the transfer of “blighted” land to private developers without so strict a limitation on its subsequent use, but that exception is applicable only in cases in which the use of the land by its original owner creates a danger to public health and safety.
These principles are established by two centuries of New York cases. A line of nineteenth century decisions made clear that the State could not use the eminent domain power to transfer property from one private owner to another, unless the use to which the second owner put the property would be “public” in some meaningful sense. In the twentieth century—an era friendlier to government, and less friendly to private property— this rule was diluted, but our cases do not justify the conclusion that the public use limitation was abandoned or rendered trivial. Rather, the twentieth century cases created what may be called a “blight exception” to the public use limitation. The critical question on this appeal is whether that exception applies, a question that can be better understood after a more detailed description of the way our “public use” law has developed.
In the early nineteenth century, New York judges debated whether the eminent domain power could ever be used to transfer property from one private owner to another (compare Bloodgood v Mohawk & Hudson R.R. Co., 18 Wend 9, 13-16 [1837, op of Chancellor Walworth], with id. at 56, 59, 60-61 [op of Senator Tracy]). Later cases make clear that this debate was settled in favor of the Chancellor’s view that certain uses of property by private parties—e.g., for “turnpike and other roads, railways, canals, ferries and bridges” (id. at 13)—could be considered public, but that takings in which land was transferred to private hands would be strictly limited to situations in which the public nature of the use was clear (see Taylor v Porter, 4 Hill 140 [Sup Ct 1843] [taking of land for a private road held impermissible]; Matter of Deansville Cemetery Assn., 66 NY 569 [1876] [taking for cemetery use held impermissible]; Matter of Eureka Basin Warehouse & Mfg. Co. of Long Is., 96 NY 42, 48 [1884] [taking for docks, basins, piers and other structures held impermissible because “(t)he enterprise is, in substance, a private one, and the pretense that it is for a public purpose is merely colorable and illusory”]). In Matter of Niagara Falls & Whirlpool Ry. Co. (108 NY 375, 383 [1888]), we said: “The right *548of the state to authorize the condemnation of private property for the construction of railroads and to delegate the power to take proceedings for that purpose to railroad corporations, has become an accepted doctrine of constitutional law and is not open to debate.” But we held that the proposed taking in the Niagara case, which was for a railroad that would serve “the sole purpose of furnishing sight-seers during about four months of the year, greater facilities than they now enjoy for seeing . . . part of [the] Niagara river,” was not for a public use (id. at 382).
Under the nineteenth century understanding of public use, the taking at issue in this case would certainly not be permitted. It might be possible to debate whether a sports stadium open to the public is a “public use” in the traditional sense, but the renting of commercial and residential space by a private developer clearly is not.
Our twentieth century cases, while not all consistent and containing some confusing language, are best read as modifying, rather than nullifying or abandoning, the established public use limitation. A series of cases upheld takings for what was variously characterized as slum clearance, removal of blight, or correction of unsafe, unsanitary or substandard housing conditions (Matter of New York City Hous. Auth. v Muller, 270 NY 333 [1936]; Matter of Murray v LaGuardia, 291 NY 320 [1943]; Yonkers Community Dev. Agency v Morris, 37 NY2d 478 [1975]). While these cases undoubtedly expanded the old understanding of public use, they did not establish the general proposition that property may be condemned and turned over to a private developer every time a state agency thinks that doing so would improve the neighborhood.
Muller approved a taking of property where “unsanitary and substandard housing conditions” were found to exist (270 NY at 337). We observed:
“The public evils, social and economic of such conditions, are unquestioned and unquestionable. Slum areas are the breeding places of disease which take toll not only from denizens, but, by spread, from the inhabitants of the entire city and State. Juvenile delinquency, crime and immorality are there born, find protection and flourish. Enormous economic loss results directly from the necessary expenditure of public funds to maintain health and hospital ser*549vices for afflicted slum dwellers and to war against crime and immorality. Indirectly there is an equally heavy capital loss and a diminishing return in taxes because of the areas blighted by the existence of the slums” (id. at 339).
Muller did not involve transfer to an ordinary private developer: the property in question was to be rented by the City, or by “limited dividend corporations,” to people of low income (270 NY at 342). In Muller, we reiterated the essential principle of the public use limitation:
“Nothing is better settled than that the property of one individual cannot, without his consent, be devoted to the private use of another, even when there is an incidental or colorable benefit to the public. The facts here present no such case .... [T]he public is seeking to take the defendant’s property and to administer it as part of a project conceived and to be carried out in its own interest and for its own protection” (id. at 343).
Murray, unlike Muller, did involve a taking from which a purely private company “may ultimately reap a profit” (291 NY at 329). The need to remedy “conditions in those blighted urban areas where slums exist,” conditions that “affect the health, safety and welfare of the public,” furnished the reason for upholding the taking (id. at 326).
Our later decision in Yonkers Community Development is relied on heavily by ESDC here as permitting great leeway to the State in condemning blighted areas. But Yonkers contains language looking in both directions. It does seem to adopt a rather loose interpretation of “substandard” conditions that would justify a taking (see 37 NY2d at 483), but it also says that “courts are required to be more than rubber stamps in the determination of the existence of substandard conditions” (id. at 485) and that “in order to utilize the public purpose attached to clearance of substandard land, such clearance must be the primary purpose of the taking, not some other public purpose, however laudable it might be” (id. at 486). In Yonkers, we found that the agency had not provided factual support for its claim that the land to be taken was substandard (id. at 484-485), but held that the landowners had failed to raise this issue properly by their pleadings (id. at 486).
ESDC also relies on Kaskel v Impellitteri (306 NY 73 [1953]), which involved a very questionable “slum clearance” taking, *550but overlooks an important aspect of that case. The challenge to the governmental action there was brought not by a condemnee, but by a taxpayer suing under General Municipal Law § 51, and we emphasized that in such a case the plaintiff must show corruption, fraud or “a total lack of power . . . under the law, to do the acts complained of’ (306 NY at 79). We implied that the case might be different if the “arbitrary and capricious” standard of a CPLR article 78 proceeding were applicable (id.). Even on the stringent section 51 standard, Judges Van Voorhis and Fuld dissented and would have held plaintiffs claim sufficient to withstand summary judgment (id. at 82-91 [Van Voorhis, J., dissenting]).
The most troubling cases cited by ESDC are Cannata v City of New York (11 NY2d 210 [1962]) and Courtesy Sandwich Shop v Port of NY. Auth. (12 NY2d 379 [1963]), which can be read to support an interpretation of “public use” that would permit the transfer by eminent domain of almost anyone’s property to a private entity if a state agency thinks the area would benefit from “redevelopment.” These cases, however, must be understood in historical context. They were decided after the United States Supreme Court had adopted, in Berman v Parker (348 US 26, 33 [1954]), a “broad and inclusive” definition of public use, to include any “object . . . within the authority of Congress.” Berman, as later cases confirmed, eviscerated the “public use” limitation of the United States Constitution (see Hawaii Housing Authority v Midkiff, 467 US 229 [1984]; Kelo v New London, 545 US 469 [2005]). And at the time of the Cannata and Courtesy Sandwich Shop decisions, our Court had not adopted the practice, which later became common (see People v P.J. Video, 68 NY2d 296, 303 [1986]), of interpreting our State Constitution to afford broader protection to individual rights and liberties than the Federal Constitution does. I would view Cannata and Courtesy Sandwich Shop as mistakenly following Berman’s lead, and would limit them to their facts or simply reject them, adopting instead the reasoning of Judge Van Voorhis’s powerful dissents.
II
The majority does not wholly reject what I have said in section I of this dissent. Indeed, the majority seems to accept the premise that the Eminent Domain Clause of the New York Constitution has independent vitality, and may offer more protection to property owners than its federal counterpart. I am *551pleased that the majority does not follow the Supreme Court’s decisions in Berman, Midkiff and Kelo, which equate “public use” in the Constitution with public purpose, thus leaving governments free to accomplish by eminent domain any goal within their general power to act. Where I part company with the majority is in its conclusion that we must defer to ESDC’s determination that the properties at issue here fall within the blight exception to the public use limitation.
It is clear to me from the record that the elimination of blight, in the sense of substandard and unsanitary conditions that present a danger to public safety, was never the bona fide purpose of the development at issue in this case. Indeed, blight removal or slum clearance, which were much in vogue among the urban planners of several decades ago, have waned in popularity, vindicating the comment of Judge Van Voorhis, dissenting in Cannata, that “[t]he public theorists are not always correct” (11 NY2d at 218). It is more popular today to speak of an “urban landscape”—the words used by Bruce Ratner to describe his “vision” of the Atlantic Yards development in a public presentation in January 2004 (Powell, For Brooklyn, a Celebration or a Curse?, Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2004, at A3).
According to the petition in this case, when the project was originally announced in 2003 the public benefit claimed for it was economic development—job creation and the bringing of a professional basketball team to Brooklyn. Petitioners allege that nothing was said about “blight” by the sponsors of the project until 2005; ESDC has not identified any earlier use of the term. In 2005, ESDC retained a consultant to conduct a “blight study.” In light of the special status accorded to blight in the New York law of eminent domain, the inference that it was a pretext, not the true motive for this development, seems compelling.
It is apparent from a review of ESDC’s blight study that its authors faced a difficult problem. Only the northern part of the area on which Atlantic Yards is to be built can fairly be described as blighted. As the majority opinion explains, the northern part has long been included in the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA), and is afflicted by deteriorating conditions perhaps attributable to the presence of the Vanderbilt Yards. But the southern part of the project area, where petitioners live, has never been part of ATURA and appears, from the photographs and the descriptions contained in ESDC’s blight study, to be a normal and pleasant residential community.
*552ESDC’s consultants did their best. Proceeding lot by lot through the area in which petitioners live, they were able to find that a number of buildings were not in good condition; petitioners claim that this results in large part from the fact that Ratner’s plan to acquire the properties and demolish the buildings had been public knowledge for years when the blight study was conducted. Choosing their words carefully, the consultants concluded that the area of the proposed Atlantic Yards development, taken as a whole, was “characterized by blighted conditions.” They did not find, and it does not appear they could find, that the area where petitioners live is a blighted area or slum of the kind that prompted twentieth century courts to relax the public use limitation on the eminent domain power.
The majority opinion acknowledges that the conditions ESDC relies on here “do not begin to approach in severity the dire circumstances of urban slum dwelling” contemplated by the cases that developed the blight exception (majority op at 524). The majority concludes, however, that determining whether the area in question is really blighted is not “primarily a judicial exercise” {id. at 526). In doing so, I think, the majority loses sight of the nature of the issue.
The determination of whether a proposed taking is truly for public use has always been a judicial exercise—as the cases cited in section I of this dissent, from Bloodgood in 1837 through Yonkers Community Development in 1975, demonstrate. The right not to have one’s property taken for other than public use is a constitutional right like others. It is hard to imagine any court saying that a decision about whether an utterance is constitutionally protected speech, or whether a search was unreasonable, or whether a school district has been guilty of racial discrimination, is not primarily a judicial exercise. While no doubt some degree of deference is due to public agencies and to legislatures, to allow them to decide the facts on which constitutional rights depend is to render the constitutional protections impotent (see e.g. NAACP v Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 US 886, 915 n 50 [1982]; Ker v California, 374 US 23, 34 [1963]).
The whole point of the public use limitation is to prevent takings even when a state agency deems them desirable. To let the agency itself determine when the public use requirement is satisfied is to make the agency a judge in its own cause. I think that it is we who should perform the role of judges, and that we should do so by deciding that the proposed taking in this case is not for public use.
*553Judges Ciparick, Graffeo and Jones concur with Chief Judge Lippman; Judge Read concurs in result in a separate opinion in which Judge Pigott concurs; Judge Smith dissents in another opinion.
Order affirmed, with costs.