Paxety Pages

White folks began to settle the area when Judge Allen Heyser arrived in 1881. He built a home, then kept adding to it as more people arrived. Soon he had a hotel. Black folks arrived at about the same time. The History of Riviera Beach, a pamphlet prepared for the 1976 bi-continental, notes that Willie Melton purchased land in 1888. Folks have lived there in individual homes ever since. It's now a town of about 33,000 people.

Now that's going to change if the Powers That Be have their way. According to MSNBC, the City of Riviera Beach has selected the Viking Group to redevelop the area. The hook, as always, is that the redevelopment will provide 1,000 jobs, a charter school, and mixed-use development.

The CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) plan calls for moving U.S. 1 west to make room for a manmade lagoon with 400 boat slips, including some for mega-yachts. Next to the lagoon is to be a mixed-use complex of undetermined density featuring condos, apartments and a hotel above retail shops and restaurants. Also on the water would be an aquarium, a park featuring an amphitheater and a marine sales center.

Much as Fort Lauderdale attracts visitors and creates boat service jobs through its robust marinas, Riviera Beach's new marina will become the center of the city's revitalized economy, said Viking Chairman Robert Healey.

Investor's Business Daily says the project is worth $1-billion.

Trouble is, no one asked the folks who already live there and own the property, most of whom are poor and black. The article says the redevelopment area includes 5000 residents living in 2,262 homes and 317 registered businesses. That sounds like single family homes to me.

"This is a community that's in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year," said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown. (Washington Times)

 Jacqui Loriol insists she and her husband will fight the loss of their 80-year-old home in Riviera Beach.
    "This is a very [racially] mixed area that's also very stable," she said. "But no one seems to care ... Riviera Beach needs economic redevelopment. But there's got to be another way." (Times)

The master development team is working with affordable housing specialists to redevelop lots throughout Riviera Beach and keep residents in the community, said Ian Meredith, a partner at Portfolio Group. The developers will only seek property with eminent domain as a last resort, he said. (MSNBC)

Now does this make sense? You're going to take 2,262 homes and build 2,262 more homes? No, can't be. The buzz word "affordable housing" must mean some kind of housing project where people, instead of owing their own homes, will be stacked on top of one another.

And not how the threat of eminent domain is tacked on at the end. Again from The Washington Times

He (Mayor Brown) defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is "using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers."

That's just absolutely wrong. Government used eminent domain power to build public works - government buildings, highways, hospitals, etc. It has only been since the Kelo case that government has taken property and turned it over to developers to increase the tax base.

Dana Berliner, senior lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented homeowners in the Kelo case, said "pie in the sky" expectations like those expressed by Mr. Brown are routine in all these cases. 

"They always think economic redevelopment will bring more joy than what is there now," she said. "Once someone can be replaced so something more expensive can go where they were, every home and business in the country is subject to taking by someone else." (Washington Times).

The reporters don't ask the important question in my mind. No one disputes the Riviera Beach area is economically depressed, even though it sits across the inlet from Palm Beach.  Are the 1000 promised jobs ones that current residents of Riviera Beach will be hired for, or will new people be brought in and given those jobs? I would suspect the jobs are skilled positions in the ship building industry, and that the current residents will not be qualified for them Thus they will be out of their homes, will not get the higher paying jobs, and will be even more economically depressed.

Update - Mora writing at Babalu points out the latest from Carlos Alberto Montaner - The assault on private property has begun in Venezuela.

The excuse is the elimination of factories and large land tracts that are supposedly unproductive. Because these enterprises do not generate wealth or jobs with the zeal that President Hugo Chávez might desire, the government will expropriate them.

Once they are held by the state, Chávez, always generous with the income derived from oil or the taxes paid by Venezuelans, will inject the properties with capital and with thousands of workers who will earn lavish salaries.

Read the whole thing and ask yourself - how is the action of mini-dictator Chávez ethically different from Mayor Brown?

The economic consequence of such stupidity is the collective impoverishment of society. The more public enterprises lose money, the poorer becomes the society that needs to sustain them.

And in the case of Riviera Beach, if, as I suspect, the present residents won't get the new high-paying jobs, the economic consequence is also the collective impoverishment of society - the rich will go on being rich, but the less rich and poor will become even poorer.

Where private property doesn't exist, rebellion or plain civil disobedience is impossible. Where the state owns the means of production, society bows its head servilely, because the government controls its sustenance and because every enterprise becomes one more link in the repressive chain.

That explains why no communist dictatorship ever disappeared as the result of a massive popular rebellion. The citizen in the hands of the state is a defenseless being. Those of us who remember the process that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall know it only too well: communism collapsed when the East Germans began to run toward the border and Gorbachev refused to shoot.

While Riviera Beach is not descending into communism, the right to own private property is equally endangered. If the government takes private property for redevelopment in 2005, who's to say the local government won't get a better offer in 2025, and take the property away from the new owners? Where does the process end? It doesn't.

Property rights are individual, human rights. A man or woman works to acquire property - spending his time, effort and sweat.  All one has is time on earth, and if that time is spent to buy a piece of property, that property is a good part of the owner's humanity. Government theft of property is theft of life.