Setting Boundaries

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By KOFI SEFA-BOAKYE

Proposition 98, or the Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act, is nothing more than a “Trojan horse” ingeniously crafted by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association ostensibly to protect landowners from eminent domain.

However, for all intents and purposes, the measure contains a subterranean agenda to usurp the constitutionally mandated land-use powers of local government to protect the environment and chart orderly development of communities. Proposition 98 would stifle the flexibility necessary for policymakers to address our social and economic dilemmas at a time when depressed urban communities in Los Angeles County, including Compton, Watts, Boyle Heights, etc., are formulating land-use strategies to take back their cities by recycling underutilized lands, curbing incompatible land uses and abating negative effects of unsavory businesses.


‘Regulatory takings’

Backers of the initiative argue that the eminent domain powers granted to state and local governments have often been utilized as vehicles to advance private interests and developers at the expense of landowners. They further argue that current land-use regulations as adopted and implemented in cities have transformed into “regulatory takings” in as much as such regulations (i.e., zoning ordinances, affordable housing, etc.) result in the decline of adjacent property values. Granted, the initiative would protect the rights of landowners, but what about the negative externalities imposed on the neighborhoods by existing businesses such as strip clubs, liquor shops and other environmental conditions detrimental to the health and safety of adjacent residents? Would the initiative protect affected neighborhoods?

Proponents are quick to invoke the spirit of Adam Smith. The free market system, they argue, left to its own devices would (through the invisible hand) rectify negative externalities by “creative destruction” for the common good. But such libertarian principles have outlived their usefulness in the modern city. Eminent economists from John Kenneth Galbraith to Nobel laureate Douglass North have demonstrated that free markets in absence of regulatory policies and governmental institutions cannot protect individual rights of residents (including property owners), which Proposition 98 professes to provide. The role of government in the marketplace has become imperative to ensure delivery of public and private goods that cannot be attained by the private sector acting alone.

Today, policy leaders, as social entrepreneurs, are challenged to adopt local land-use policies necessary to solve knotty social, environmental and economic issues confronting the complexities of modern societies. In the ever-challenging task of balancing individual rights against the common good, they are challenged to select optimum projects that could provide the highest benefits to the community. For example, if Project A would provide jobs, minimize auto dependence and enhance the environment, and if Project B would infer the opposite to the community attract prostitution, traffic congestion and pollution which project should the policy leader support for the common good of all residents? Of course, Project A!


Urban impact

Yet this power would disappear if Proposition 98 becomes a reality come June 3. Proposition 98 would eviscerate the power of local government to put into place land-use portfolios necessary for abatement of negative externalities that foster crime in neighborhoods. Nowhere would this initiative exert more devastating impact on the local economies than the urban communities of Compton, Watts, Boyle Heights, etc. Emerging from a legacy of urban decay in the wake of the Watts Riots of 1965 and the post-industrial era, these communities are challenged to assemble land, overhaul outdated zoning regulations, replace aging infrastructure, and remediate abandoned and polluted industrial properties in order to revive their economies. Land-use portfolios including specific plans, transit-oriented developments, smart growth and mixed-use developments are the framework to restructure their respective economies.

Unfortunately, Proposition 98 would eradicate this governmental land-use power. Under the initiative, affected property owners could sue local governments for “regulatory takings,” exposing taxpayers to billions of dollars in lawsuits. Ironically, Proposition 98 would make pollution and other environmental injustice issues a property right, forcing taxpayers to pay billions to stop unfavorable land use. That’s why I believe Proposition 98 is nothing more than a Trojan horse at the front gates of inner cities, masquerading as a white knight to deliver gifts to distressed property owners. Hidden inside the wooden horse (like the Greeks in Homer’s account of the Trojan War) are slumlords absentee owners with their attorneys ready to undo economic revitalization efforts in struggling communities.

Homer’s epic poem in the aftermath of the Trojan War is very descriptive in Latin: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” or “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”


Kofi Sefa-Boakye is director of the Compton Community Redevelopment Agency.

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