We live in an era of the visual, with readership declining and people increasingly getting their information from a screen — mostly a little computer screen, even though big movie screens are still hanging in there. So we were glad to learn that a movie about the wretched Kelo case has been made and is now being distributed. The national columnist George Will has joined in with a column reviewing it (link at the end of this post).
Kelo v. New London was the Connecticut eminent domain case in which the city of New London took an entire lower middle class neighborhood in order to turn it over to a private developer on a long-term lease (for a dollar per year). That developer was supposed to redevelop it into a higher class area of shops, classy condos and a marina, all serving well paid professional employees of a nearby research facility of the Pfizer company, the pharmaceutical biggie. The case eventually wound up in the US Supreme Court which, by a 5 to 4 vote sided with the city, over sharp dissents by Justices O’Connor and Thomas.
However, the project turned out to be a total failure, and the supposedly thoroughly vetted city plans turned out to be so much hot air. After an unblighted 92-acre waterfront neighborhood was destroyed, displacing its unoffending inhabitants, nothing was built on the site. Pfizer, which was to be the beneficiary of the economic revival flowing from the project, exhausted the tax benefits it got from the city, and instead of adding jobs as promised, moved out of New London, lock, stock and barrel. The site of the redevelopment project is now a vacant, trash-strewn wasteland. This caper cost the city and state some $100 million with nothing to show for it, except a tidal wave of popular revulsion that swept the country. The envisioned tax gains turned into losses, thus illustrating the line of the late California Court of Appeal Justice, Macklin Fleming, who once observed that when it comes to redevelopment, the bigger economic pie the project promoters tout as coming to all, turns into pie in the sky.
The movie’s title, like that of the book on which it is based is The Little Pink House
The link to George Will’s review is:
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/04/19/george-f-will-case-of-eminent-domain-in-little-pink-house-speaks-truth-to-power/
For a review of this film by Variety, go to:
http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/little-pink-house-review-1202758328/