[ip26]

Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read.

In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works).

[1]: I think it was https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[z1nc]

Then the important thing is that a process of weighing those rights/costs/benefits and so on exists. e.g., if they needed to tear down a couple of apartment buildings and disrupt hundreds of folks, I could see an argument against that. But for just one guy? Eh...

---

That article has a lot of disturbing things in it- 200 extra workers (that even the union guys said weren't needed), inflated costs, low competition driving up bids, gifts given to government officials from contractors, and so on.

This bit is the most concerning:

“Is it rigged? Yes,” said Charles G. Moerdler, who has served on the M.T.A. board since 2010. “I don’t think it’s corrupt. But I think people like doing business with people they know, and so a few companies get all the work, and they can charge whatever they want.”

If you gotta play semantics on whether you're in a rigged system or a corrupt one...

[parineum]

> In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists)

I wish they'd modify the language of eminent domain to reward double, triple or even quadruple market rate. I want people being _happy_ to have their property seized.

[BHSPitMonkey]

This would be a great way for corrupt politicians to funnel large sums of real estate money to their friends and donors (or to trigger wild speculation bubbles anywhere people think eminent domain is likely to be applied).

I do think these payouts need to be well in excess of market rates (in order to properly compensate people for inconvenience / related expenses / opportunity costs, but tripling or quadrupling property values is a bit far fetched.

[technobabbler]

Whatever, pork-barrel corruption is already an everyday part and parcel of our system. Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere.

Any time you have a massive building project you're going to get corruption. If you can't even eminent domain it through useful areas, you're just going to get developers buying land in the middle of nowhere and selling it back to the government as the only remaining viable route.

[randbox]

>Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere.

Eminent domain is not only used to acquire owner occupied homes for infrastructure. In some cities it is used to purchase poorly maintained properties from slumlords.

Landlords get what rent they can and don't invest anything in upgrades because they know they can cash out with the city government or public land bank. Promising to pay 2-4x may make the problem worse.

If a building is nearly fully depreciated, and has $0 building value, and the landlord invested closed to $0 in maintaining it, but the land is worth $200K, why should they get 4x whatever they claim the gamed comparables are and $800K from the public for doing nothing?

Maybe 150% of the building replacement cost for owner occupied homes makes sense, but ideally absentee investors holding depreciated properties and vacant lots wouldn't get paid a dime for the land value.

[technobabbler]

Because otherwise it'd be a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good? That scenario would happen anyhow even at market rate.

As a taxpayer I'd rather see some money wasted, and some progress being made, rather than nothing getting done ever.

Corruption and waste are tolerable to some degree, IMO. "Government wastefulness" is too often code for not letting the government do anything at all.

I just don't think our current societal bottlenecks are due to a budget or GDP crisis. There is so much wealth locked away, I'd rather it be spent on public works even if it means losing a few cents on the dollar to corruption along the way.

It's not like the private sector is risk free, or that the government doesn't waste money on wars and questionable foreign aid already.

There is such a backlog of infrastructure to build, whether roads and bridges or prisons and schools and climate change mitigation or renewables or nuclear... we gotta do something about that. If that means a slumlord getting rich, I guess it's a cost of doing business?

Or what's a better alternative?

[DennisP]

I used to know a former state senator, who would say "the road to riches in this state is cheap land and cheap politicians."

She had a background in forensic accounting, was instrumental in getting a particular state senator convicted of corruption, and lost the support of the state party in the process.

[technobabbler]

> She had a background in forensic accounting, was instrumental in getting a particular state senator convicted of corruption, and lost the support of the state party in the process.

You point out a different, and arguably way more important, problem in our politics: we have no real pathway for domain experts to become powerful representatives and provide meaningful oversight. Instead you just have corrupt lawyers vouching for other corrupt lawyers, writing corrupt laws and appointing corrupt judges, all with the active approval and participation of the two major parties. It's just evil all up and down the chain.

[ip26]

Blessing graft & corruption is weirdly popular on HN.

[technobabbler]

I think it's just an acknowledgment and acceptance that the system is thoroughly fucked, and there's no public will to overthrow it or clean it up, so seeking incremental gains where possible is better than nothing.

If you do nothing, there corruption will still be there, but nothing will improve.

If you try to push things through, the corruption will still be there, but maybe small things will get built here and there.

What do you think is a better solution to corruption? Starve the state? We've been doing that for decades and that just further empowers private interests, the same people who've benefited from and furthered corruption in government. shrug No easy fix. Every country has corruption, but the highly functional governments tend to have less of it because they attract more well-intentioned career civil servants instead of powermongers.

[tinco]

You could make it conditional on some things. The goal is to compensate for discomfort, not to compensate lost income. So you could say you only compensate primary residences and self operated businesses, both occupied for 3+ years.

Or you could approach it from a different angle and compensate each resident and business operators with $10,000 relocation cost (in addition to buying their property with a 5% extra). That has the added benefit of eliminating more of the market price risk from projections.

[datavirtue]

I think the optimal course is to have a very painful eminant domain process that pays a crappy above market rate so that government is incentivized to offer actual market rate (big project wants your land so market rate is vastly increased as a result). I have seen corn fields sold for millions because a state college wanted it for a new campus. The market rate was well under $1MM. For that land eminant domain would have been a nightmare because of the particular politics and unimproved nature of the site....so they had to offer actual market rate...which is the rate demanded of someone when they know it's a monied developer that wants it.

[icelancer]

Exactly. "Market rate" is ridiculous, and justifiably private property owners should be able to hold out sine market rate doesn't factor in switching costs, both financial and emotional.

I think 3x market rate is a decent starting place.

[notreallyserio]

I think the amount paid should be based on the average market rate of properties where the person must move to have the same commute and amenities. If the government wants to destroy the poorest area, at least folks there can move somewhere nicer without much inconvenience.

[zdragnar]

That is an incredibly easy way to waste money.

Political donor: Hey Mr. Politician, I am going to buy some massive apartment complexes. Do me a favor and put a road through them, would you?

Politician: Sure thing, there's an election coming up and I do so love helping out our citizens! holds out hand to receive wads of donations

[p20z]

The current model enables the same behavior and makes it harder to track. Stalled projects have ongoing costs that make the project developers real money in exchange for no real effort. The same donor simply says “hey mr politician, give my company the exclusive contract and never mind that my aunt owns a building in our way. I’ll only charge you 30% for each year we are stalled.”

We burn money on these projects either way. A good windfall to property owners gives regular families a chance at enjoying some profits… and makes donors who block progress just a little easier to track!

[technobabbler]

This is in fact how many projects get built today, even without eminent domain.

[zdragnar]

If graft is a problem, the answer should not be "make graft easier and more common"

[technobabbler]

Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem.

I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it.

By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.

[rootusrootus]

Given how the sheer amount of money wasted when even one property owner holds out, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to justify a serious premium on the amount paid to those whose property is seized. In most cases I imagine it's just a small part of the overall cost of the project.

[IggleSniggle]

Don’t want them to be TOO happy to have property seized. Creates a bunch of perverse incentives

[scarface74]

What happens historically that if a government has a choice between destroying wealth in a minority neighborhood or destroying wealth in a non minority neighborhood, it’s usually the minority neighborhood.

[slothtrop]

New York has an interesting History of projects being ramrodded through dubious means (at the expense of the public) under Robert Moses in the early 20th Century, I imagine stops were put in place to prevent that from occurring again.

[Spooky23]

The Moses story is more nuanced than that. Read the Caro book.

Ultimately the triumph of Moses was understanding the nature of power and making key friends and allies who helped him wield it. He got shit done. In the beginning, this was enormously beneficial - the state and city park systems, key bridges, and the framework of competent engineering that blunted the impact of the depression… New York was uniquely able to benefit from New Deal programs, because of Moses. We remember the exclusionary bridges of the Northern State Parkway, but forget that these highways broke the Dutch legacy of quasi-feudal great estates and baymen who kept the public from the seashore.

The problem is that his acquisition of power transitioned from triumph to tragedy. His friend Gov. Smith gave him ironclad control of key public authorities - he held 100 different jobs at one point. As in all cases, unchecked, unlimited power corrupts. Only Gov. Rockefeller was able to break the guy, and only because his family was his bankers. Moses’ empire ultimately saved NYC, as the subways would have been bankrupt without the toll bridges supporting the rail system.

Today, New York has a murky soup of laws that give certain unions a lot of power, and require that projects are bid out with multiple prime contractors, etc. Between that and the political dynamic from the transportation system being controlled by the State (the governor controls the MTA) and the complex home rule of NYC, it’s a complicated mess.

That said, NY is more functional than most other places when it comes to transit.

[specialist]

Much belated. Apologies.

> Moses’ empire ultimately saved NYC, as the subways would have been bankrupt without the toll bridges supporting the rail system.

Moses did the opposite. As detailed in the book The Power Broker.

He looted mass transit to fund sprawl. At one point, he even had a secret deal with the Republican leadership in Albany to redirect subway revenue into some bond finance scheme. (I don't recall the details.)

He did much the same with the toll booths. That revenue was used to finance bonds, which were then spent on more sprawl. Very little of it was spent on improving the city's core. He worked very hard to hide the details.

In fact, my hunch is that Moses' various finance schemes and exfiltration of monies is directly responsible for NYC's financial troubles, which almost caused that government to default on its debt. I really wish someone would followup on Caro's work, connect those dots.

Moses' strategy of looting urban centers to fund sprawl was then replicated everywhere.

[deanCommie]

Complex historical men need deep layers of evaluation (See also: Columbus, Washington, etc)

Layer 1: This is a great man who did great things (Moses: public projects)

Layer 2: He was discriminatory, racist, and optimized for his ilk/kind whether it's racially, genderly, socio-economically, etc. (Moses: Focus on white people or at least those of sufficient socioeconomic class)

Layer 3: Progress for SOME people is better than nothing. Improving public access and transportation for poor whites is better than not having anything at all.

Layer 4: Partial progress is often used as an excuse to stop further progress. And if you promote one group at the expense of another, you arguably create MORE inequality not less.

etc.

[slothtrop]

I read the same book you did and your impression of him is too generous. Moses lied, cheated, and strong-armed his way to "getting things done".

[bradleyjg]

It’s common wisdom to say these projects were dubious. There’s no question they came with costs—-but would we rather not have the BQE, Cross Bronx Expressway, or Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? I don’t think we would. It’s easy to fantasize about public transit alternatives but even with Robert Moses NYC is a significant outlier in the US for public transit both in the city and in the region.

[Spooky23]

There’s a tail wagging the dog factor to the highway stuff. The FHA sealed the fate of those neighborhoods by cutting off the oxygen.

I live in a small city that was carved up by redlining. My block was in the “yellow” zone, and the houses built after 1935 or so are very different than the houses on the next block, which is in the “green zone”.

Yellow = Italians and Greeks, 1 and 2 family small houses. Green = old money types, bigger houses on fancy lots.

[DogOfTheGaps]

BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway definitely not. Building highways through cities is extremely damaging and exist only to ferry suburbanites into and out of the city. Moses wanted to build a highway through Greenwich village. That would have been devastating for lower Manhattan. Intra-city Highways destroy the very vibrancy required for them to adapt and change.

Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? That is a good project. Connecting different areas across bodies of water is good.

[bradleyjg]

That’s ideology over common sense. Which suburbanites are being ferried in and out of the city over the BQE?

Hint: what it connects is right there in the name.

[DogOfTheGaps]

Fort Lee, NJ to Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

[lupire]

Easy to say when your neighborhood wasn't the one destroyed.

[bradleyjg]

NYC is about change. If you want stability there’s the whole rest of the country. I have no patience for people that want it both ways.

[treeman79]

Is there any other way to actually get things done in such a dense area?

[throwaway290]

IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.) rather than the governments not having the crazy power to just do anything they want if they think it is "public good". The latter is horrifying, I fail to see how it is ever desirable (even if it occasionally leads to positive outcomes, it cannot be trusted to do so reliably).

[fpig]

Usually they're trying to profit by being the last holdouts, hoping they will be able to get more money this way. It may not be worth paying everyone 3X, but if everyone except one person agreed to X, then paying the last holdout 3X is not a huge expense and gets the project going. At least that's what they're hoping for.

There was a case in my city where they wanted to build a shopping mall and offered the people who owned homes on the plot a deal. Only 1 person refused and asked for much more money (in his words "Who accepts the first offer??"), and since this plot wasn't critical for the project, they never even contacted him after that and just built it without his plot: https://www.vecernji.hr/media/img/38/97/a9f29b9fca44602d5b41... (the lone house in the "corner"). He got mad, sued them, etc.

This was a private company; I'm not sure why the government would have this problem, since they can exercise eminent domain for stuff like infrastructure, it's literally why it exists.

[lupire]

Because government abuses its power, and the US still as a bit of anti-totalitarian DNA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

[retrac]

> why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them (are those holdouts being paid or otherwise motivated to hurt public good? organized? do they have pathological distrust to the government, how can that be worked out? etc.)

A highway extension here in Ontario was blocked for years by homeowners who, as far as I can tell, just didn't want their community bulldozed to put in a highway. An entirely reasonable position to hold, regardless of whether the highway is to the public good. There is no reasonable incentive you could give to get some people to give up land they have been on for their whole lives. When one is talking hundreds of properties as in the case of that extension, you will absolutely find a stubborn person who will say no.

[throwaway283929]

The cool part of that story is where they seized property with eminent domain, built the toll highway with tax money, then sold the whole thing at a discount to an international conglomerate, to be a toll highway for the next 100 years.

[seanmcdirmid]

What’s wrong with toll highways. The tax money is still needed to build it, the company operating it isn’t making so much money as to negate that, and eventually the money is replenished through usage fees. By making it a toll way, the people who use it will pay for it eventually, and it discourages low value usage of the road.

[throwaway290]

In this particular example can't the holdout see how it would benefit the economy (as roads do) that they're part of, possibly reduce emissions into the environment they live in, etc.?

If the government provides them with replacement property, why would they object so strongly?

And doesn't the fact that everyone else agreed make them consider that perhaps it would be public good for some reason?

[7steps2much]

> In this particular example can't the holdout see how it would benefit the economy (as roads do) that they're part of, possibly reduce emissions into the environment they live in, etc.?

Zou are trying to use logic here, but the simple truth is that a lot of times people don't care about that. They are emotional beings. They simply do not care about any of the points you made, they want to keep their house/property/whatever. They don't care.

Smoking is bad for people and the people around them, yet many don't quit. Wearing masks is great for the public good, yet many do not. One could go on about vaccines and other topics but the simple truth is: They do not care.

That is why laws exist to take these properties from them. If they are absolutely opposed to the offers made, unwilling to sell and can't be moved then you take the property, hand them what others agree is a fair price (or at least the fairest they can come up with), and go through with it anyways.

[throwaway290]

I disagree that this is acceptable status quo. Emotion has roots, and people can be reasoned with. Lack of care is a threat to democracy.

It looks like if underlying issues are resolved, then there would not be a need for such overreach.

[7steps2much]

Please don't miss understand, i do agree with you. In an ideal world one should be able to reason with others, people should care about their surroundings and the society that they are a part of.

However, in the world that we live in you also need to keep in mind that we want to get things done. In my experience things such as eminent domain are only used after quite a while of failed negotiations.

The simple truth is that we expect our institutions and governments to get things done. We want them to eventually build a road, not argue with people for years on end whether or not they should sell their property. In many jurisdictions around the world eminent domain or similar is also tied to court proceedings, making it truly the last option.

The current status quo is a compromise nobody is happy with:

* People expect governments to actually get thing done * Some people cannot be reasoned with in a timeframe that is acceptable to society

So they came up with the easiest solution: Negotiate with them until it's clear they won't budge or it takes too long, then force it your way.

If there was a way to get everyone to see reason in a reasonable timespan we might not need the status quo. However, as of right now nobody around the world has achieved that. If anyone manages to do so then we might be able to get rid of things like eminent domain, but until that's the case we are stuck with it, for better or worse.

[retrac]

If you don't feel strong emotional attachment to some particular property, I'm not sure I can explain it to you. There is no monetary value that can replace the living room where you watched your kid take their first walk, or the field where your grandparents are buried, if you happen to be that kind of person.

An analogy: why not make taxes voluntary? (Eminent domain is conceptually most similar to taxation, after all.) Surely after you explain that it's to the public good, you won't have any holdouts, right?

[throwaway290]

I understand emotional attachment to property. I also understand that nothing is permanent and it may be necessary to let go.

Since I was a child, family moved and sold previously used estate/flats more than once. Yes, there are memories and my grandparents built and lived there. Now other people build and live there. Life goes on.

We are not talking about somebody persuading you to sell your property to satisfy their fancy. It is a cause that will have positive effects on the region and the country.

And you personally, meanwhile, get a free chance to move and find an even better spot that doesn't have the shortcomings of the previous one. I recall that's sort of how USA started.

Framing emotional attachment as an overriding motive and purpose strikes me as an excuse for complacency, aversion to change, laziness.

[jolux]

> why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them

Because if the government can't exercise eminent domain then those people are incentivized to extract maximum value from the government over the land. They may not want to sell it, or they may charge an exorbitant price.

[imtringued]

It's kind of strange how the law recognizes that land ownership is a source of power yet does absolutely nothing against it. If the government has to override the law, just imagine how much they distort the private economy, where there is no easy way out. So many apartments couldn't be built and so many people could not be housed.

[jolux]

Land value tax would solve this.

[ip26]

There's a host of problems. A simple example is a holdout who sees they are the only remaining obstacle to a project, and demand ten million dollars for a fifty thousand dollar plot of land the government needs for the project. A very capitalist mindset! But poison to public works. There's no "working with" someone who thinks they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket.

Another simple problem is that of guarantees. If the government is certain to be able to secure the land in a reasonable timeframe, they can structure the whole project on top of that certainty, planning from start to finish, establishing financing, signing contracts... If acquisition is an open-ended negotiation in which the holdout can linger for decades, either nothing can be done until every last square foot of land is secured, or else you risk suspending everything halfway (very expensive).

[imtringued]

This problem wouldn't exist with a land value tax because he would get a $200k tax bill every year (2% LVT).

[notahacker]

It's not that simple when the plot of land is developed, because you can't build an expressway without also buying whatever structures sit on that land, which aren't rateable for an LVT and may genuinely be worth much more. Holdouts argue the lot is the same low value land it always has been for LVT purposes but they want $10m to sell their beautiful ancestral family home that sits on it...

A traditional property tax rating encompassing the value of the lot and everything that sits on it works much better for compulsory purchases.

[narag]

IMO the problem is why such stubborn holdouts exist and why can't the government work with them...

I suspect the legal system is one of the reasons. Judges and precedents carry more weight than in other countries, where parliaments can just pass a law that's unassailable.

On the other hands I read here news about authorities summarily seizing (not just freezing) assets from people that are only accused. That's unconceivable in other jurisdictions.