Democracies that legally and forcibly remove people from their houses

Submitted by Kevin Heald (United States), Apr 5, 2005 at 16:04

Dear Dan Pipes:

Ben Ratner is in the process of removing at least hundreds, possibly thousands, from their residences (in this case apartments) in Brooklyn to build a stadium for a basketball team.

I have no idea how many people Robert Moses had removed from their houses to build his massive public works projects, but I believe the number was substantial, if not thousands. (Well a quick google search produced one article that says 60,000 lost their homes just to the Cross Bronx Expressway. (From a London Review of Books article reviewing: Autopia: Cars and Culture ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr • Reaktion, 400 pp.))

I forget the official term (eminent domain?) but I believe it's quite common for a Democratic state to claim land for the good of the majority.

Kevin M. Heald

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