A Month in Review: June
Our Tennessee student chapter partnered with the Elmahaba Center, Middle Tennessee's DSA, and Safer Schools Nashville, in curating a space to grab unionized coffee and talk abolition in Nashville. This event was structured to answer questions regarding abolition as well as discuss what a future where abolition is a reality would look like. It was held on June 11 at Three Brothers Coffee.
Tennessee student organizers additionally petitioned the Metro Nashville Council to advocate for a divestment from school police and towards community and student programs for the benefit of all Metro Nashville students.
Our New York student chapter petitioned the New York City Council, during the June budgetary season, to fund student resources and not School Resource Officers.
Our Maryland student chapter joined with the Baltimore Police Free Schools coalition and Youth As Resources to hold a School Police Roundtable, discussing various efforts to secure more citywide mental health funding and hold School Resource Officer programs accountable to ensure the safety and security of every student.
Maryland student organizers additionally issued a statement alongside the Baltimore VOTES Coalition in retaliation of Governor Hogan’s vetoes of SB 157 and HB 192, bills that would expand student voting powers on Baltimore City and Baltimore County Board of Education, respectively.
Organizer Spotlight with Ethan Eblaghie (MD)
How Unrestrained Eminent Domain Serves as a Tool for Capital
The eminent domain powers granted to Congress under the Takings Clause of Fifth Amendment were something of a liberal addition to the Constitution at the time of the founding. Even in American jurisprudential and political history, it has broadly been a progressive issue, such as in Justice John Paul Stevens’ infamous 2005 majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London, which expanded the rights of government to expropriate private property for “public purposes”.
Indeed, eminent domain has always been seen more broadly as a policy lever to help take from the rich to give to the poor, particularly in instances of extreme gentrification and disruption of public and residential properties — the Robin Hood effect.
It is, then, slightly ironic that perhaps the most accurate opinion issued in the High Court’s Kelo ruling was the dissenting opinion authored by moderate conservative Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She wrote “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
This has proven itself accurate. Even at the time of the Kelo decision, the country’s most prominent civil rights groups, from the ACLU to the Cato Institute, rejected the ruling, anticipating the evolution of eminent domain from an issue of constitutional importance to a civil rights issue, forseeing the exploitation of private forces, backed up by capital, of the loophole Kelo established.
The very nature of government in countries where state institutions are structured to be subservient and supplementary to the interests of capital, such as the United States, means that the process by which eminent domain is conducted with public and community input is rendered useless, or even belligerent, as it is used to manufacture consent for the dissolution of communities by forces of capital.
Our elected representatives very rarely conduct constituent casework and research for legislation they cast votes on in genuine consultation with community groups, instead relying on the feedback of a small group of politically savvy individuals, generally from backgrounds with greater socioeconomic mobility. This is true especially in lawmakers from the country’s most gentrified cities, when a constituency might encompass both those the worst and best off in our society.
Moreover, even when our representatives and public officials do genuinely submit themselves to public feedback, incorporating it is no easy task. Turning over private property for public use requires that the public be in consensus regarding the end goal and purported community benefit, and this is difficult to achieve in a political system where participation in the civic process is disenfranchised and discouraged and many are disillusioned with their systems of local and municipal government entirely.
When eminent domain is exercised to the public’s benefit, it is the result of immense organizing — of many groups of like-minded people with shared goals moving heaven and earth to command the attention of their government officials and to present a case more persuasive than the campaign check that real-estate developers can offer lawmakers to turn a blind eye to displacement and gentrification.
Therefore, we find ourselves in a system wherein eminent domain is exercised, for the most part, to the benefit of the forces of capital — the privatization of public lands under the guise of progressive initiatives, such as “urban renewal”.
The communities with no class-conscious political apparatus — that is to say, the majority of poor communities in America — find their neighborhoods under assault from billionaire developers and construction conglomerates that abuse loopholes in state laws, making use of misappropriated funds for construction and development for luxury housing in the center of existing residential spaces.
This leads to the “development” of neighborhoods, largely on the dime of taxpayers that will never benefit from urban renewal projects, that displaces residents and makes it even more difficult for communities to organize across intersectional lines for their own self-preservation.
Elsewhere, developers may take advantage of abandoned housing or low property values, using it to build “social housing” designed around a benchmark of affordability that does not properly account for sharp gentrification and residual redlining.
To be clear, development without displacement and in consultation with community members is not only possible, it’s been done and is being done in countless neighborhoods across America. Unfortunately, the unavoidable nature of our state institutions as chess pieces on the board of capital leaves them completely hamstrung in executing the vision of eminent domain imagined by 18th century progressives.
For instance, in Baltimore, Maryland, one of the country’s most gentrified and redlined cities, countless blocks in Southwest Baltimore have been subject to municipal “urban renewal programs”, entailing historical neighborhoods like Poppleton and Harlem Park — often historically referred to as Black Wall Street, being sold off to New York and California based developers that do not engage with community leaders in good faith and do not allow for community participation in development practice.
This leaves us with several options. We can curb eminent domain powers on a broader level, curtailing Kelo either by relying on the more originalist High Court of today or by passing comprehensive federal protections for tenants and homeowners, but this runs the risk of making it too difficult to keep corporate forces in check when community advocates do win elected office.
On the other hand, community involvement in keeping local leaders accountable and ensuring that they do not pay lip service to community members, following through on promises and punishing malicious and bad-faith developers, is equally critical, albeit equally constrained in its ability to solve this crisis in a broader sense.
In Baltimore, community organizations are fighting back against billionaire developers, taking a stand against eminent domain abuse and joining one another in solidarity for their homes. In just a couple of weeks, they have a critical hearing before the local development board asking them to designate Black Wall Street under municipal historical status, shielding it from future demolition or private acquisition.
Join us in supporting their letter-writing campaign here —
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/protect-black-neighborhoods