A Mississippi town declared multi-generational homes in a historic black neighborhood "blighted" as a pretext to seize them through eminent domain, a new lawsuit claims.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Thursday on behalf of several residents of Ocean Springs, who say the small town abused Mississippi's urban renewal laws to brand their close-knit neighborhood, where generations of families have lived, a blighted slum.
The suit argues Ocean Springs' failure to adequately notify residents that their homes were being included in an "urban renewal zone," and Mississippi's failure to require such notification, violate the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.
"Ocean Springs cannot brand neighborhoods as slums in secret," Institute for Justice senior vice president and litigation director Dana Berliner said in a press release. "Depriving people of their property rights without any process is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. Ocean Springs should be happy to have such a closely-knit, warm community. It shouldn't try to destroy it."
One of the five plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Cynthia Fisher, has lived in her family's 100-year-old house in what's known as the Railroad District for more than 70 years. Six generations of her family were raised in the house, and seven family members live in close proximity.
"This neighborhood means everything to me," Fisher said in the press release. "We're proud of our neighborhood and while we may not have a lot of money to put in our homes, we keep them well. What the city did, labeling our neighborhood as a slum without telling us, was wrong."
Under Mississippi law, a municipality can designate an "urban renewal area" after a factual finding that it's predominated by slums or blighted property. However, there is no requirement that property owners be notified either before or after a blight designation and how it could affect their property.
According to the lawsuit, the Ocean Springs Board of Aldermen held a public hearing on April 4 of this year to discuss approving six areas as urban renewal zones, which only appeared on its agenda that week as "Adopt a Resolution approving the Urban Renewal Map."
The board relied on letters from three city officials—all of which the lawsuit argues were short on details and failed to mention specific properties—as a factual basis for its blight findings.
Mississippi law only gives property owners 10 days to challenge a blight designation after such a resolution is passed, a statute that the Institute for Justice also argues is unconstitutional. None of the residents challenged it because they had no idea their properties had been declared blighted. It was only after the town revealed its urban renewal plan this August that property owners realized their property could now be seized through eminent domain—and it was too late to challenge it.
The other "blighted" properties include vacant parcels of land bequeathed by deceased parishioners to a 130-year-old church in the neighborhood. Some of the houses were hand-built by the ancestors of the current occupants.
Pictures included in the Institute for Justice's lawsuit show that the targeted properties may not be in perfect condition, but they are kept up and in no sense of the word slums.
The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause allows the government to seize property through eminent domain, although it must provide adequate compensation to owners. Traditionally, eminent domain could only be used for public works projects, but in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that it could also be used to clear out slums for redevelopment. Then in the 2005 case Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court cleared the way, so to speak, for cities to use eminent domain to seize private property for the purpose of economic development.
Cities can now use overbroad definitions of blight and fuzzy projections of economic growth to clear entire neighborhoods for private development projects. Reason's Christian Britschgi reported in August on a family in Houston, Texas, who are at risk of having their multi-generational home seized to make way for the expansion of an adjacent high school football stadium's parking lot. Earlier this year, Reason also reported on how Tennessee plans to use eminent domain to seize private farmland for a Ford electric vehicle factory.
Fisher and the other plaintiffs are asking the court to invalidate Ocean Springs' urban renewal resolution and find Mississippi's urban renewal statute unconstitutional on its face.
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