New Jersey Town Uses Flimsy Blight Allegations To Seize Tire Shop, Apartment Building
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week’s stories include:
- Proposed funding cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
- Zoning reform in Baltimore.
- Encampment crackdowns in California.
But first, our lead story on a case of apparent eminent domain abuse in New Jersey. There, the city of Perth Amboy is using incredibly flimsy blight allegations to seize an apartment building and a family-owned tire shop from owners whose families came to America to escape communism.
In Perth Amboy, Property Rights Take a Back Seat to ‘Redevelopment’
Honey Meerzon’s parents are Jews from the Soviet Union, who moved to the United States in the 1970s to escape religious discrimination. Luis Romero’s parents fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba when he was eight years old.
The two ended up as neighboring business owners at the corner of Smith and Herbert Streets in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. It’s there that Romero has been running his family’s tire shop, Quick Tire, for the past 20 years. Meerzon has owned the four-unit rental property next door for the past 10.
Now, these two children of refugees from communism are having their businesses taken from them by the all-too-American process of eminent domain.
Last month, the City Council of Perth Amboy voted that Meerzon and Romero’s properties were not, in fact, comfortable homes or a successful business, but are rather blighted hazards.
Because their two buildings are too close together, too close to the street, and have some (since-collected) litter and stray cats in the backyard, the city says it is now entitled to take the properties.
Meerzon and Romero strongly object to the idea that their properties are in any way blighted. They argue that the city’s report claiming otherwise is riddled with erroneous complaints and fatal factual errors.
Nevertheless, the city has moved forward with seizing their properties, which sit right on the edge of a massive city-facilitated warehouse project.
Both property owners now face a looming deadline at the end of May to file a lawsuit challenging the seizure.
“They refuse to answer our calls. They refuse to answer any of our lawyers,” says Meerzon. “They’re waiting for us to go to superior court to monetarily drain us until we have no choice but to take whatever they offer us.”
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Article from Reason.com
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