Eminent Domain Essay

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Do you own property? Are you happy where you live? What if the government said they were taking your property, but they were going to pay you fairly and possibly help you relocate? Eminent domain is the power for the government to take private property from the owner for public use. Doesn’t seem like a great deal for the land owner, especially if it were you. While eminent domain needs no constitutional recognition for governments to use, the US Constitution states: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” (US Department of Justice). Governments have been using the power of eminent domain for ages, and when they use this power, it is usually to preserve, improve, or provide something for the public. Over …show more content…

The purpose of eminent domain is for the government to look at the opportunity costs of using the power of eminent domain or not. In some cases it may seem useless to use eminent domain because the cost of compensating the land owner for the land outweighs the potential revenue of the new use of the land or importance of providing or protecting. In one case, a town in Ohio used eminent domain to take a strip of his property to make a bike path through part of the town. They were not taking all of his land, a mere 1 mile long strip of his 80 acre property, and they were going to compensate him with a little more than $9,000, a price at which the strip of land was appraised at. After going to court like many eminent domain cases do, it was determined that the land not only was worth quadruple its appraised value, and because the strip of land devalued his property because it cut off the backside, he was owed almost $560,000 dollars on top of the property value (Narciso). This is the case where the use of eminent domain backfired on the town, and the landowner was sitting pretty good. The town does get the land and its bike path, but at a much heftier price than anticipated, and the property owner sacrifices a small amount of his land for an outrageous compensation, with a little help from the US court

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