Town Secretly Seizes Developers’ Property Then Threatens Them With Trespassing Citation
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week’s newsletter focuses on some shocking updates to a Rhode Island eminent domain case we covered last month.
As readers might recall, in the Providence suburb of Johnston, the town government and its very outspoken mayor have been attempting to seize a family of developers’ land to prevent their construction of an unsubsidized affordable housing project.
Last week the developers sued to stop the seizure in federal court, alleging that the “municipal campus” Johnston was seizing the land for was merely a pretext to stop new affordable housing.
Already, Rhode Island law establishes a fairly elaborate process that local governments have to follow when using eminent domain to take land for public buildings.
The developers’ constitutional challenge to the town’s seizure would typically delay things even more.
But in a surprise turn of events late last week, the town is claiming to have already seized the developers’ plot without providing any advance notice to the owners and without following the processes laid down in Rhode Island law.
The owners first learned of the seizure via Johnston’s mayor’s X post. With the town now alleging that the seizure is complete, it’s telling the former owners of the land they have until Friday to get off it or else they’ll be cited for trespassing.
In response, the developers are now filing for a temporary restraining order to stop what they describe as the town’s unprecedented lawlessness in taking the land.
“In 40 years, I’ve seen some pretty outrageous exercises of eminent domain powers. Never anything like this,” says Robert Thomas, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public interest law firm, who is representing the developers.
Posting Through It (Eminent Domain)Â
For the past several years, Lucille Santoro, Salvatore Compagnone, Ralph Santoro, and Suzanne Santoro, a family of Rhode Island developers and their various LLCs, had been in talks with Johnston officials about developing a 31-acre site the family owned on the edge of town.
Those plans crystalized in December 2024, when the Santoro family participated in a pre-application meeting with city officials, where they discussed their plan to build a 254-unit project.
Johnston’s local zoning code would not have allowed that many units on the site. However, amendments made to the state’s longstanding affordable housing law gave developers a large “density bonus” if they built rent-restricted low- and moderate-income housing.
Because the density was generous enough and the rent restrictions high enough, the Santoro family was able to use the law to propose a completely privately funded “affordable housing” project on their land.
The Pushback
The project did not sit well with Johnston Mayor Joseph Polisena, who wrote an open letter opposing the project shortly after the Santoro family filed their application.
In that letter, dated December 3, 2024, the mayor said the town would “roll out the
Article from Reason.com
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