Tear down a church, put up a Costco

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that widens the scope of eminent domain could be bad news for churches:

Jared Leland, legal adviser for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said churches could be especially vulnerable.

“Because all houses of worship are tax-exempt, they will continue to be attractive targets for seizure by revenue-hungry local governments,” Leland said. “We’ve already seen attempts to take them in favor of a Costco in California and a condo development in New Jersey.”

It’s one thing to seize property for a genuine public need, quite another to do it in order to benefit a private entity. Or so it seems to me. Especially in these cases where towns want to create upscale shopping districts by displacing primarily lower-income homeowners and small business owners. What happened to “A man’s home is his castle”?

P.S. Note this quote from Justice O’Connor‘s dissent (no fire-breathing right-winger, she):

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner. … Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory.

and

Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.