A tear in a window screen might lead to a bigger insect problem, or a minor eyesore for passersby, but in Charlestown, Ind., it can also lead to the loss of your home.
Within the small city of about 8,000 people, the working-class neighborhood of Pleasant Ridge, populated primarily by lower-income families and retirees, has been targeted by the city for redevelopment — and it appears the city is willing to use any means necessary to get rid of the 357 homes there.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Kelo v. City of New London case, which sanctioned using eminent domain for economic development and private gain, Indiana adopted restrictions on such use of eminent domain, so the city had to get more creative to oust its unwanted residents.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm representing 43 property owners in the neighborhood, explains how the city was able to force people from their homes. “City inspectors started fining Pleasant Ridge homeowners for minor or trivial property code violations — like a torn screen, chipped paint or a downed tree limb. The citations stated that the owner owed $50 per violation, per day, and multiple citations were issued per property, which means that a single home could accumulate hundreds of dollars in fines per day.”
“In many cases, the fines began accruing the day a citation was issued, so by the time an owner received it in the mail, he or she was already on the hook for thousands of dollars in fines.” This violates the city’s own property maintenance code, IJ contends, which allows owners a reasonable period of time to correct issues before fines are imposed, as well as state law prohibiting immediate, accumulating fines for alleged unsafe buildings. “The city program also violates the homeowners’ constitutional rights of due process, equal protection and free speech, as well as the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines,” IJ asserts.
Keep in mind that Pleasant Ridge’s prefabricated homes, originally built during World War II for workers at a nearby (and long since closed) ammunition plant, only have a market value of between $25,000 to $40,000, and this is a relatively poor section of a city where the median household income is about $43,600 a year.
The city then offers homeowners one out: Sell to real estate developer Neace Ventures, which has been buying up properties for $10,000, a fraction of the fair market value, and the city will waive the fines.
To be sure, there are legitimate safety issues with some of the old homes, but many others are perfectly safe and well cared for. Nonetheless, the city wants them all gone.
“Fines are a tool cities sometimes use as a last resort to ensure that properties are safe,” IJ attorney Anthony Sanders said in a statement. “The city, however, has turned fines into weapons, using them to force homeowners to sell to a private developer at a steep discount.”
This is not the first time IJ has represented victims of nitpicky city fines. Shortly after the state of Missouri capped how much revenue cities could generate from traffic tickets in 2009, the city of Pagedale saw a 500 percent increase in non-traffic-related tickets. The town’s ticketing orgy included fines for such minor offenses as having holes in window screens, displaying mismatched curtains, walking on the left-hand side of a crosswalk, wearing pants below the waist or having weeds in the yard higher than seven inches.
The new wrinkle in the Charlestown, Ind., case is that a city is “using code enforcement to circumvent eminent domain law,” IJ attorney Jeff Rowes told the New York Times. The fear is that this may become a model for central planners and busybodies in local governments to do an end run around inconvenient property rights protections that stifle their agendas and grand designs.
“The great and chief end … of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property,” Enlightenment-era philosopher John Locke wrote in his “Two Treatises of Government.” In other words, what good is government if it not only fails its chief responsibility, but actively violates the rights of those it was established to protect? It is certainly easier for government officials to ignore and trample upon others’ interests to further their own aims, but that does not entitle them to toss property rights out the window, even if it has a torn screen.
Adam B. Summers is a columnist with the Southern California News Group.
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