The Battle For Brooklyn, a documentary about one man’s fight to stop a private developer from using eminent domain to take his home, recently opened in select theaters in New York City after a successful film-festival run.

In 2003, billionaire real estate developer and New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner decided to move the team to Brooklyn, with the intention of building an arena, an affordable housing project, and bringing desperately needed jobs to the borough of Brooklyn. Ratner’s friend and fellow billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, enthusiastically put the weight of top-down government planning behind the project. That included using the city government’s extensive powers of eminent domain, despite the fact eminent domain is supposed to be used only in cases where development is for public uses such as schools and roads. And despite the fact that the construction of what became known as the “Atlantic Yards” project would displace many thriving businesses and homes.

Graphic designer Daniel Goldstein fought for nearly seven years to keep his home out of the hands of Ratner’s company, Forest City Ratner. Goldstein’s quixotic struggle is the centerpiece of The Battle For Brooklyn.

Reason.tv sat down with co-directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley to discuss eminent domain abuse and political perceptions of their film. Galinsky and Hawley insist their film is not a polemic, but rather an all-too-common story of a single person fighting an injustice against figures whose power and influence drawf his own.

Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. About 4.40 minutes.

Go to http://reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

Related video: Billionaires vs. Brooklyn’s Best Bar: Eminent Domain Abuse and the Atlantic Yards Project.

Your home is supposed to be your castle. That is, until the government needs to buy it for a road project. So, what’s the fair price for your property when it comes to eminent domain? Maybe less than you think.

In a state where thousands of properties have been threatened and continue to be threatened, California is in desperate need of meaningful eminent domain reform that will respect the rights and property of its residents. The preceding legal overview in California demonstrates just how difficult it is for private property owners to defend themselves against California’s redevelopment machine, which siphons billions and billions of dollars into a closed economic system that benefits private parties and hurts not only property owners, but all taxpayers as well.

[I]n the last 60-some years, redevelopment agencies have become fiefdoms that run up enormous debt and abuse eminent domain by transferring private property to large developers promising to build tax-generating bonanzas. Today, there are 749 such projects. In the late 1950s, there were only nine….

In the 12 years I’ve spent reporting on this issue, I’ve seen an agency attempt to bulldoze an entire residential neighborhood and transfer the land to a theme-park developer. I’ve witnessed agencies declare eminent domain against churches—which pay few taxes—in order to sell the property at a deep discount to big-box stores that promise to keep city coffers flush. Working-class people and ethnic minorities often are the victims of this process since they often live in the vulnerable neighborhoods, and they have less muscle than big business developers….

While economic development and local control are crucial issues, it’s hard to understand why any Republican would believe that a regime of government planning and subsidy is the best way to achieve those goals. They should be standing up against the abuses of property rights and the fiscal irresponsibility inherent in the redevelopment process and championing market-based alternatives to urban improvement—even if it means defending a proposal from a Democratic governor they often disagree with.

This is an historic opportunity to finally end eminent domain abuse in California, which has been fraught with abuse, fraud, and waste.  California needs your help!  Do you work in media?  Do you have a blog?  Is there anything you can do to help?

Simply put, we have a chance to stop Big Government in California.  But action is needed now, or it will be too late.   For more, visit www.ij.org and check out our facebook page.

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:

When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and they’re finally doing it.  He was upset.  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m halfway around the world to help other people and I can’t even help my own mom keep her own home.”

For the past ten years, township officials in Mount Holly have been destroying a close-knit community called the Gardens.  They’ve been recklessly bulldozing select individual row-houses — even when they are attached to occupied homes — to make way for fancier homes for richer people.  The current owners have never been offered a place in the new redevelopment, or enough money to buy comparable home nearby.

A new Institute for Justice study, available here, shows that this redevelopment project may result in a loss of one million dollars every year, one tenth of the township’s budget.

Despite these terrible conditions, the community never gave up hope.  They continued to fight against all odds for their cherished neighborhood.   And on Wednesday, a federal court came to their defense.

The Third Circuit issued a ruling that prohibits the city from moving forward with eminent domain against the homeowners involved in the lawsuit until they have a chance to let their voice be heard in court.  The ruling likely means that the neighborhood has another year to fight for and save their community.

Without this ruling, the neighborhood would have likely been completely destroyed before the end of the month.

Activism expert Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice has been working with the homeowners in their grassroots fight.   They launched a major billboard campaign (see above), generated positive local media coverage, ran full-page ads, held events, and more.  Christina has visited the residents numerous times over the past year, and described her experience in the Gardens recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nancy Lopez raised five children on her own, and they have since gone on to college and joined the working world. She sometimes worked two jobs to afford the mortgage on her three-bedroom house in the Gardens. And now the township is telling Lopez that her home, her efforts, and her memories aren’t good enough.

Down the block, Leona Wright just turned 92. When she moved into the Gardens, her son was in the third grade. Her late husband was a World War II veteran, and they moved to the Gardens because they thought they could put down roots there. They bought two rowhouses and combined them into one, now meticulously decorated with family photos and memorabilia.

These women and their neighbors loved the Gardens. They relied on one another and helped raise each other’s children. Over the years, they’ve held block cleanup competitions, festivals, and talent shows. Their mutual concern for each other was the lifeblood of this community, and the township has drained it without a second thought.

And yet despite the best efforts of tax-hungry politicians and land-hungry developers, the Gardens will not be completely destroyed anytime soon.

Mount Holly shows us that more work is needed in our nationwide fight to end eminent domain abuse.  But it also shows us that a small band of committed activists, working together, can triumph over Big Government.

We are hopeful that with this week’s ruling the Gardens will ultimately prevail.

Are you fan of IJ on facebook?  Become one today!  Just click here.

Today, Carla is fighting back.

This morning, Carla asked a Texas appeals court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against here by a developer involved in the Texas case.

Some background:

The Texas developer behind this abuse project is H. Walker Royall.  As the video makes clear, millions of taxpayer dollars later, the project is now an epic debacle.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

In March 2002, a group of private investors, led by a man named H. Walker Royall, formed a company called Freeport Waterfront Properties. Six months later, consultants hired by the city released a redevelopment plan — and, amazingly, it recommended a private marina, just what Mr. Royall’s investors had hoped for. The city did not open the marina project to competition; it just handed it over to Freeport Waterfront. Conveniently, Mr. Royall sat on the board of Sun Resorts, another company that the city selected, also without competition, this time to manage the marina once it was built.

The cozy arrangements didn’t stop there. Freeport agreed to give the private investors $6 million in the form of a no-recourse loan. . . . The only obstacle to this sweetheart deal was Western Seafood. It owned the land where Mr. Royall and his friends wanted to build. The city came up with a clever way around this problem. Claiming eminent domain, it proposed to take only part of the company’s land. . . . The tale gets worse.

Carla’s book gives an accurate and fascinating account of what happened in Freeport, Texas. If successful, the lawsuit against here could permanently ban Bulldozed from further printing and distribution.  [The book is available on amazon here.]

Carla summed this up at Real Clear Politics:

Royall has picked on the most vulnerable people he could find–writers, a scholar, a nonprofit publisher and a community newspaper. He didn’t sue more powerful venues, such as The Wall Street Journal, which favorably reviewed “Bulldozed,” or the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine, which have the resources and the lawyers to defend themselves.

In the schoolyard, someone who acts like Royall is called a bully. We are grateful for friends, including the public interest advocacy organization the Institute for Justice, who have rallied to our side to represent us. In this latest misadventure unleashed by Kelo, what is at stake are not only property rights, but intellectual freedom and the First Amendment. It’s a battle worth fighting.

The Institute for Justice, the nation’s leading legal advocate for liberty, fights for victims like Carla Main all across the country. Today, we appeared in the Dallas courtroom beside Carla, asking a panel of judges to put an end to the lawsuit against her.

According to IJ Senior Attorney Dana Berliner:

Eminent domain for private development is the subject of nationwide public debate.  If Walker Royall doesn’t want anyone to talk about him or his development deals, he shouldn’t enter into deals that involve a city condemning his neighbor’s property.

Simply put, private developers shouldn’t be able to bulldoze private property.  And the victims of such abuse, and those who talk about it, should never be silenced.

Click here for more on the lawsuit. The Institute for Justice is also online at facebook, You Tube and twitter.

Today, the government is bulldozing her old neighborhood.  Here’s the real kicker:  The homeowners are forced to pay the cost of demolition.

Nobel prize-winning libertarian economist F.A. Hayek famously wrote that “the great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.”  There is no better example of this fundamental struggle than Rosa Parks, known today as The Mother of the Freedom Movement.

She refused to be treated as a second-class citizen.  But her hometown of Montgomery, Ala., segregated blacks on public transits.  Minorities were forced to sit in the back, forced to give up their seats to whites, and sometimes were left standing on the side of the road after paying their fare.  Rosa stood up to the Big Government Bullies and said enough is enough.  Her demand for equality before the law forever transformed America.

Rosa once said:

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free . . . so other people would be also free.

Indeed, she made the world a better place.  So how despicable is it that today officials in her old hometown are forcing people to give up their homes?  The government is tearing down houses against the property owners’ will and then sticking them with the bill.

Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice writes at the Daily Caller:

Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you.  Oh, and you’re paying for it.

This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it works:  The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.”  It mails you a notice that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).

Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and if you don’t pay it within 30 days . . . the city can sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder for cash.

The victims of such abuse are often minorities.  For decades, African-Americans across the country have disproportionately had their property rights violated by government officials.  In the 1950s things got so bad that “urban renewal” became known as “negro removal.”

Dr. Mindy Fullilove, a research psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry, authored a study for the Institute for Justice called Eminent Domain & African Americans.  In it she writes:

[B]etween 1949 and 1973 . . . 2,532 projects were carried out in 992 cities that displaced one million people, two-thirds of them African American,” making blacks “five times more likely to be displaced than they should have been given their numbers in the population. . . . Eminent domain has become what the founding fathers sought to prevent: a tool that takes from the poor and the politically weak to give to the rich and politically powerful.

According to sources on the ground in Montgomery, hundreds of homes and properties have already been destroyed in the last five years, most or all of them owned by minorities.  The state recently passed solid eminent domain reform to curtail property rights abuses, so—as Walsh explains—Montgomery is using a complex end-around to sanction their demolitions.

To be clear:  What is happening to Rosa Parks’ historic neighborhood is not eminent domain abuse.  That’s illegal now.  Today’s abuses are occurring through an altogether different law.  One major difference is that with eminent domain, the property owners are compensated for their loss.  With today’s demolitions, the property owners are forced to foot the bill.

Jimmy McCall, seen in the video above, was building his dream house in Montgomery.  And then the government came and bulldozed it:

It was my dream house and the day they tore it down my wife cried and my little girl cried. . . . They came and they tore down the house anyway.  They have no regard for the rule of law.  You know, they do what they want to do.

This weekend, Montgomery activists are teaming up with the Institute for Justice in a grassroots workshop.  They will discuss strategies on how to empower themselves and protect their most basic rights.

Will you join in this campaign?

Do you have any friends or family in the Montgomery area to notify about Saturday’s workshop?  Do you have a blog where you can raise awareness about this outrage? Will you post something about these abuses on your facebook page?  Whatever you can do, please do.  Details on the event are available here.

If we are going to succeed in protecting our rights, we have to work together.  And remain vigilant.

You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse.  That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.

But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture.  And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.

We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.  But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.

This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Consider the case of Margaret Davis.

As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her.  One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house.  The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.

Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.

Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back.  And that’s not all.  As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture.  So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.

Predictably, abuse is rampant:

• In Louisiana, police were caught stealing innocent people’s property by making up crimes that never happened.  They used the proceeds to fund ski trips to Aspen.

• In Texas, a government official was caught pumping forfeiture funds into his re-election campaign.

• In Nebraska, officials stole over $124,000 from a resident without ever charging, let alone convicting, him of a crime.

• In Missouri, authorities were caught turning forfeitures over to the federal government in order to avoid a legal requirement that proceeds go to schools.  That way, both groups could split the proceeds without having to share any with the children that were supposed to get the money.

Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents.  Civil forfeiture is now a nationwide epidemic.  A new report by the Institute for Justice found that the federal government is now holding over a billion dollars in assets seized through civil forfeiture.

And that’s not counting any of the state and local governments.

IJ’s report, available to view and download for free here, is the first to grade the civil forfeiture laws of the federal government and all 50 states.

What grade did your state get?  You can easily search the report by state here.

This is part of a new national campaign started by the Institute for Justice to end civil forfeiture.  We also filed suit in Texas, which has some of the worst forfeiture laws and practices in the country.

We are representing a small business entrepreneur from Houston whose American Dream was turned into a nightmare after his property was stolen through civil forfeiture.  He did nothing wrong and was never accused of a crime.

Our forfeiture campaign follows in the footsteps of our eminent domain work.  In courtrooms across the country, we will keep fighting the government to secure the bedrock American principle of private property rights.

Even though IJ has had tremendous success in courts, eminent domain abuse was stopped in large part by grassroots activists.  We desperately need a similar grassroots backlash against civil forfeiture.  Simply put, we need your help.

Will you work with IJ to help end civil forfeiture?

Please speak out.  Consider blogging and talking about the property being stolen in your state.  I encourage you to make use of the research included in our forfeiture report as well as our forfeiture video.

Should you write something up, please email me the link at bewing@ij.org.  And if you have any questions, or you’d like to be a part of our national coalition of property rights activists, just let me know.

Governments should protect, not plunder, our property.  Common sense and justice demand that this rampant abuse of private property rights must end.

Our fight will not be easy.  But working together, we can stamp out the injustices of civil forfeiture once and for all.