Oak Park best neighborhood
Historic Preservation (Heritage Conservation) has done it again. Oak Park became one of the United States’ top ten neighborhoods, according to the American Planning Association, and it did it the old fashioned way: it saved its historic buildings.
The Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie School of Architecture Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and made subject to local landmark controls in 1994 (notice the distinction, Kenilworth???) is the best place to live in Illinois, according to the planners. As the article notes, Wright and the other Prairie architects wowed them a hundred years ago and they still are. Must be some good architecture, no?
Kelo Redux
The big 2005 Supreme Court case – Kelo v. City of New London – that underscored a city’s right to use eminent domain to take private property and give it to another private owner has reached a perhaps inevitable denouement: the City of New London, CT, took Susette Kelo’s house, and a bunch of others, for a private “urban village” to be built next to a new Pfizer development. Now Pfizer is leaving, and taking 1400 jobs with it. Yowch.
The real lesson here has less to do with eminent domain and more to do with economic development. Conservative justices voted against the city, but in a sense the use of eminent domain for private redevelopment has been with us since Berman v. Parker in 1954, which paved the way for urban renewal and preservation. Memory refresher: urban renewal was a public program, but it basically worked like this: the government declared an area “slum and blighted,” bought up all the land and gave it to another private developer to achieve the renewal. Yes, there were housing projects that were completely public, but the biggest part of urban renewal involved the same sort of eminent domain and transfer of property to another private owner we saw in New London. Continue Reading