Interesting reading of the City of Santa Ana Redevelopment Agency:


Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Editorial: Central planning trashes decent neighborhoods
Santa Ana, with its finger on the eminent domain trigger, "mugged" property owners.
The Orange County Register

Sunday's front-page Register investigation, "Redevelopment's underbelly," makes clear what we have long argued: California's redevelopment agencies squander tax dollars, destroy lives and, at the end of the day, often make worse the neighborhoods they promise to revive.

The newspaper focused on the city of Santa Ana, which over the past 10 years has spent nearly $23 million to acquire 60 parcels of land that would make for the foundation of its Civic Center Walk project. Although officials denied that they used the power of eminent domain to take any properties, the newspaper produced many letters city officials sent to property owners threatening to use eminent domain if they did not sell their homes to the city. Owners who sold tell tear-jerking stories about being forced to leave their homes, their neighbors and their lifestyles as city officials promised to do something "better" with the properties.

That's a typical City Hall ploy – claiming that property is not taken by force because the actual sales were completed without the use of eminent domain. Yet many property owners would not sell unless they were threatened with eminent domain. As anti-eminent-domain attorney Chris Sutton often explains, muggers rarely pull the trigger on their guns before people turn over their wallets. Likewise, cities rarely actually use eminent domain – the threatening letter usually does the trick for most people.

Years later the "redeveloped" area is now mostly a collection of vacant lots, a slum as one city council member puts it. The area might not have lived up to city planning department preferences, but a functioning neighborhood is far better for the city, from a tax and aesthetic standpoint, than a bunch of ugly, trash-collecting lots. And, of course, the current housing downturn has made it unlikely that the promised projects will materialize any time soon. Thanks to city officials, the effort to improve the city has made it far worse.

The Register captured the situation well: "It wasn't economic hardship that emptied this neighborhood, just east of downtown. It wasn't a crime wave or bad schools that chased away the families. No, this patchwork of vacant land littered with empty bottles and crumpled food wrappers was the work of the city."

This cost a small fortune for a city, and the $23 million doesn't include the many other costs involved, such as clearing the land, relocating residents, paying staff salaries and expenses. Also typical of the redevelopment schemes, some people – in this case savvy investors – did quite well and made hundreds of thousands of dollars in quick profit by selling their properties to the city.

Ironically, despite Santa Ana's massive failure in redevelopment, the city had, until recently, been pushing forward a massive redevelopment-like program called the Renaissance Plan, which embraced an even broader vision for changing the character of the city. Yet these programs are not fundamentally different than the urban renewal projects that destroyed so many cities in the East during the 1960s. How long will it take before Orange County officials realize that free markets work far better than Soviet-style central planning?