Monthly Archives: June 2018

The Illegal Alien Mess at the Border

As is our wont, we depart here from our usual practice of commenting on eminent domain and land use events, to comment on what’s going on in the news about the — Oh my God! — unprecedented but wicked, wicked practice of separating children from their parents when the latter are detained after crossing the border illegally, and charged with violating laws that control entering the US. In fact, such lamentations are BS — the treatment of those illegal aliens is no different than the treatment of domestic criminal defendants and their children. See Shaila Dewan, Young Children Taken From Their Parents: It Doesn’t Just Happen to Immigrants, NY Times, 6/23/18, at p. A14.

The story roiling the country has been that when those who enter the US illegally with children are separated from them when they are arrested, that is an act of gratuitous cruelty. Particularly when the children, poor babies, are left to the tender mercies of juvenile authorities, social welfare departments, and foster homes. But we haven’t seen any protesters volunteering to take those children into their own homes. Sometimes, you could come across a criminal attorney trying to help them. The fact is, however, that in spite of the turmoil there is nothing new, unusual, or cruel about it. It has always been a routine practice in criminal cases, for the simple reason that you can’t imprison young children and you can’t give incarcerated law breakers a free pass just because they have young children. In the words of Ivar Lacis, a criminal defense lawyer, in a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal of 6/23-24/18:

“It is not uncommon for criminal defendants to bring their minor children to court with them for bail hearings, revocation of bail hearings, and revocation of bail hearings. . . . ” Some of the defendants may be granted bail set to varying amounts, in which case, they could take help from a Santa Ana Bail Bonds agency or a similar agency in that particular region to post bail for them. For instance, in California, one might not be able to avail of the services of the above-mentioned agency. In such scenarios, Californian residents might be required to take the help of The Bail Boys agency or its likes for bail-related services. However, before approaching such agencies, it would be a good idea to learn how bail is determined and what you need to post bail in California.

That said, you should know that many a time, bail is not granted. In such situations when the defendant is denied bail and is taken into custody by definition he is separated from his children, i.e., the children do not accompany him to prison, so if someone like a family member is not present tom take charge of the kids, they are taken in by a state social service agency. And illegally entering the US, says the writer, is by definition a crime. And so, continues Lacis:
“As an attorney I don’t understand the current outrage. [In such cases] parents have been separated, are being separated, and will continue to be separated from the minor children by the criminal justice system. Why should there be an exception for noncitizens who have been arrested for the crime of illegally entering the U.S.?”

Moreover, it turns out that in order to accommodate and house the hordes of illegal aliens crossing the border, the government is preparing to build temporary housing and “tent cities” for those illegal aliens. See Philip Elliot and W.J. Hennigan, “Navy Document Shows Plan to Erect ‘Austere’ Detention Camps” in the Florida Panhandle near Mobile, Alabama, at Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach, Alabama, and nearby Navy Outlying Field Silverhill.”

So there you have it, folks. Tens of thousands of homeless Americans — many through no fault of their own — have been reduced to living in their cars, in the streets, under bridges, and in public parks, having to fend for themselves under horrible conditions, while alien Central Americans who willfully enter the country illegally, are being accommodated with new housing built for them. That housing, it says here, may be “austere” and we have no doubt that it is, but it is one hell of a lot better than living in the street, surrounded by unsanitary trash which — believe it or not — may not be removed by court order because, say the courts, though it contains such odious stuff as garbage, dead rats and human feces, removing it would interfere with the homeless folks property rights in their stuff.

And the hypocrites who are out there screaming over the “outrage” supposedly inflicted on the illegal aliens and their children, are not being heard from when it comes to the same practice of separating adult detainees from their minor children in domestic criminal matters. Are aliens privileged? Is there an exemption from the duty to obey the law for them?

Here in California you can’t build enough housing to accommodate ordinary people, much less the homeless, and the rents for apartments are rising out of sight, but the government is building housing for illegal aliens swarming over the order in violation of immigration laws. Are these people nuts? And the same goes for the people who have created this nightmare, while professing to be sympathetic to the plight of the homeless.

US Solicitor General’s Office Is Born Again

We haven’t yet gone through the US amicus curiae brief just filed by the federal government in the Knick case, but we have seen it and its bottom line is a suggestion to the Supreme Court that it vacate the lower court decision and eliminate from the law the requirement of having to first litigate takings claims in state court. This would eliminate the previous lower courts’ holdings that doing so amounts to the state court judgment becoming res judicata or issue preclusion, thus preventing the aggrieved property owners whose property has been taken without compensation from ever having their federal constitutional claims adjudicated in any court — state or federal.

This is a departure from the federal government’s usual pro-regulator position in these cases.

We can’t wait to see how the “police power hawks” will react to this development. Bottom line: the stakes of the Knick case have just gone up significantly.

Lowball Watch — California

A tip of our hat to Brad Kuhn who runs a blog on California eminent domain, and who reports the settlement of an eminent domain case in Palm Springs, that qualifies for inclusion in our “Lowball Watch” department. The taking involved a 29-acre former Palm Springs mall. The condemnor was a private college (they have the power of eminent domain in California).

The condemnor’s offer was $9.6 million; the case settled for $29 million. No details on what issues divided the parties’ original positions.

Brad Kuhn, College of the Desert to Pay $22 Million to Settle Eminent Domain Case, April, 25, 208.
Go to https://www.californiaeminentdomainreport.com/

Calling All Penn Central Junkies!

Remember the Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York case? If you don’t, who can blame you? But if you are sufficiently interested to do some reading about it now, check out an article in the New York Times that somehow slipped by us, and that will provide you with an up to date status of the forgotten part of the Penn Central litigation, namely Grand Central Terminal’s transferable development rights. Those rights were mentioned but not really discussed by the US Supreme Court in its famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view — opinion appearing in 438 US 104 (1979).

It looks like now, some 40 years after the Penn Central opinion, those rights are finally being sold for heavy coin, being as the City of New York has rezoned the area around Grand Central, so those TDRs can be used.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/nyregion/jp-morgan-chase-midtown-east-air-rights.html

For those of our readers who want to get into the litigational end of the Penn Central controversy, we also recommend our article, Gideon Kanner, Making Laws and Sausages: a Quarter-Century Retrospective on Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York, 13 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. Jour. 653 (2005). It’s on the long side but it will tell you all you need to know about the Penn Central inverse condemnation litigation, and then some. That was the — by our standards — infamous case in which the Supreme Court confessed that it “has been simply unable” to articulate a coherent statement of a regulatory inverse condemnation case, and instead of giving us some workable rules, gave us a list of three vague “factors” to consider when trying to decide whether the complained-of property regulation is so onerous as to require payment of just compensation to the overregulated property’s owner. Believe it or not, the US Supreme Court somehow managed to transmogrify its confessed inability to articulate any reliable rules governing regulatory takings into what it called “a polestar’ it thought would guide us through the doctrinal and logical mess that is the Supreme Court’s regulatory takings law.

So if you are interested in that subject, have at it folks.

The State of the State of California

We offer without comment an excerpt from urbanologist Joel Kotkin’s assessment of California housing trends:

“What’s causing California’s housing crunch? Misguided progressive policies that have slowed housing construction are at least partly to blame. Construction firms, for example, must pay “prevailing wages” when undertaking some new housing projects, raising building costs by as much as 37 percent. That is why choosing the right construction firm is key. For many, this Custom Home Builder in Oakville has been excellent. But for those building outside of Oakville, things are more difficult. Recent new subsidized “affordable” units in the Bay Area cost upward of $700,000 to complete. Urban theorists and planners promote government-enforced “density” requirements on new developments, ignoring data that show high-density construction to be as much as five times as costly per square foot as low-density construction. Those costs make it harder for developers to profit from housing construction, and hence less likely to build, and when they do build, the higher price tag gets passed on to residents. Those that can afford it though, often enjoy Ecominded Solutions contractors to build their own dream home. In their mind, they’d rather pay to have a house built with how expensive houses can be in California. If you’re interested in seeing Ecominded Solutions work to see if they could be right for your dream home build check out their design and build service here. Because many think building a home is more cost-effective than buying a home in the area and a lot more cost-effective than renting. Rent control now enjoys widespread support, but it, too, discourages new housing construction. However, some people are looking into the planning and development of new construction homes through companies similar to Saussy Burbank. Many new home buyers are looking for houses that have been constructed in a way that best suits them and their needs. The contractors of these new builds could have decided to build these houses using eco-friendly building materials, such as Plastic Wood Boards, Posts & Sheets. This is due to more emphasis being placed on how the environment is getting treated and more people would like to do their bit to make sure it stays in perfect condition. For some homeowners though, they just want a roof over their heads.

“California’s dramatic demographic shift has added its own problems to the housing crisis. Since 2010, California’s white population has dropped by 270,000, while its Hispanic population has grown by more than 1.5 million. Hispanics and African-Americans now constitute 45 percent of California’s total population. Almost a third of the state’s Hispanics and a fifth of its African-Americans live on the edge of poverty. Incomes have declined for the largely working-class Latino and African-American population during the economic boom, as factory and other regular employment has shifted elsewhere.”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/brownout-15828.html