For whatever reason, a lot of traffic to this site comes from searches for "eminent domain in detroit" or similar. ("Whatever reason" is probably my post in November arguing against Proposal 4 as poor lawmaking.)

Now, I am not a lawyer, nor have I ever been involved in a takings case in any capacity - I'm just someone who has taken the requisite one course in land-use law during grad school. But I can tell you what I know about where eminent domain came from and why Detroit is an important datapoint. (If I'm wrong, complain to my professor - he is a lawyer, after all.) If you need advice on a real-life example of eminent domain, consult a real-life lawyer.

What is eminent domain?

Eminent domain, (aka "takings" or "condemnation"), is the ability of the government to appropriate your property (usually land or buildings) for public use. As I learned it, eminent domain has its roots in English common law, in the idea that all property rights are granted by (or at least protected by) the crown/state, and that the state can therefore take back some property rights when it needs them.

Importantly, America's Founding Fathers agreed that the state should be able to take your property - they just wanted to make sure that the state paid you for it. Thus, they wrote the Fifth Amendment to specify that, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation - that is, property can be taken, as long as it's paid for. This has never really been a question at the Supreme Court level, but plenty of decisions have focused on what the words "taken" and "public use" mean. In fact, basically all land use law is based on figuring out what those words mean.

Regulatory takings

Obviously, if the government forces you to sell your house or business to them, it is a case of takings. A fuzzier area is the idea of regulatory takings - the idea that, "If a regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking." (Pennsylvania Coal Company, 1922.) The Court recognized that some amount of limitation on personal use of property is a valid use of police power, and necessary to protect public health, safety, and general welfare, but that, eventually, regulation can effectively prevent any reasonable use of property, and be a takings.

What constitutes a public use?

Some cases of public use are obvious. A police station or a school, for example. Other cases are based in the idea of a common carrier - that a privately owned rail line or utility corridor can be a "public use" on the merits of generally serving everyone.

Then, there are the really interesting cases which involve a public use that isn't a physical use of the property by a public body or common carrier. One of these is Midkiff (1984), in which the State of Hawaii determined that land ownership was so concentrated that it was effectively a monopoly, and was skewing the land market so much that it decided to broadly redistribute land ownership, taking land from major property owners and providing it to tenants. The Supreme Court determined that correcting the monopoly in real estate, a market failure condition, was a valid public interest.

There's also the Poletown case, which is where Detroit comes into play.

Poletown

In 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court took on the case of Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit (410 Mich. 616). In hopes of combating high unemployment, the Cities of Detroit and Hamtramck used eminent domain to take a large swath of land for a new GM assembly plant that would provide 6,000 jobs. The Michigan Court determined that this was a valid public purpose, though did caution that such uses of eminent domain needed careful scrutiny to determine whether the public benefit outweighed the harm of forcibly buying out 4,200 residents and 140 businesses. Combating urban blight had long been an accepted public purpose, but this use of eminent domain, more explicitly pro-development rather than anti-blight, was pretty new.

The US Supreme Court never heard Poletown, but it became an effective national precedent, and cities and courts across the country looked to Poletown for guidance on economic development uses of eminent domain. Then came . . .

Hathcock

Detroit's next claim to eminent domain fame was the 2004 case of Hathcock v. County of Wayne (684 N.W. 2d 765) (full opinion as pdf), in which the Michigan Supreme Court unanimously overturned Poletown, and criticized themselves pretty sharply for ever making that decision. In this case, the County condemned several parcels near DTW to add to parcels already publicly owned, in order to convey to whole package to a private developer for redevelopment as an office park, with stated public benefits of added jobs and increased property taxes. The takings was not stated as a case of eliminating blight.

The Court found that this case clearly illustrated the problem with takings for private developer - most of the benefits are to the private developer, with only tangential benefits to the public. No more shall takings be used for conveyance to private developers for the purpose of economic development in Michigan, they declared.

And then, shortly thereafter, the whole country went crazy over the Kelo case.

Kelo and fallout

In New London, CT, the town condemned several property owners to turn over the land to private developers for economic development adjacent to a new research park constructed by PfiredPfizer. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that this was a valid use of eminent domain under the State Constitution, and then the US Supreme Court got involved - and issued effectively a non-opinion. The Court's Kelo opinion (545 U.S. 469) stated that eminent domain for economic development purposes by private developers could be a public use, or it could be not - it's up to the individual States to make that determination, so whatever each of them says is what goes. (In fairness, it was more like, "This is a valid public use federally, but the States can choose to implement more restrictive definitions of public use," so it was actually a decision about the Federal definition of public use.)

This decision, and the ensuing spin of the decision as saying that the Supreme Court endorsed private developers' forcible taking of people's homes, caused a nationwide firestorm. Some of this was productive - several States clarified their definitions of public use either legislatively or by amending their Constitutions. Some was not so productive - like Michigan's amendment, which, in my opinion, was completely frivolous as just repeating what was already the case (law) in Michigan. Some was just silly - the vindictive petition drive to convince a local government to condemn Justice John Paul Stevens' home to build a hotel. (I find the, "That'll show him!" attitude of this effort as less literally frightening but every bit as civicly problematic as waiting outside the courthouse with a gun when a trial goes the wrong way.)

Anyways, that's a quick primer on eminent domain and Michigan's role in shaping national case law. Again I will repeat that I am not a lawyer, nor is Wikipedia the best source for legal truth. Get yourself a good casebook - I recommend Mandelker & Payne's "Planning and Control of Land Development" from LexisNexis.