Kelo, Sweet Vacant Lot, Coming For My Prospect Heights Home

Atlantic Yards opponents are aiming high with their latest, and possibly last strategy:

The proposed Atlantic Yards development near downtown Brooklyn could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider when government may use eminent domain to seize private property.

About a dozen holdout residents within the project’s planned boundaries are petitioning the high court to forbid their eviction. If the residents win, the development, which entails 16 towers of residential and office space and a basketball arena, would be halted. One resident, Daniel Goldstein, said his two-bedroom apartment is near center court of the proposed arena.

If four justices agree to hear the appeal, it would be the court’s first to test the power of government to seize property through eminent domain since a landmark decision in 2005 in the case of Kelo v. the City of New London. In that decision, which produced a groundswell of public opposition across the country, the court ruled 5–4 that the government can seize property and transfer it to a private developer to foster economic development.

“If they had the stomach for it, they could accept this case to overrule Kelo,” the lead attorney for the residents, Matthew Brinkerhoff, said of the justices.

Mr. Brinkerhoff’s petition to the Supreme Court focuses on a more modest aim than convincing the court to scrap its opinion in Kelo just three years after issuing it. The residents are asking the court to give them a chance to prove their allegation that the primary motivation behind the Atlantic Yards project isn’t a desire to benefit the public. Instead, the plaintiffs claim the project is mainly a conspiracy to benefit the interests of the project’s developer, Bruce Ratner, and his company, Forest City Ratner.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.