Disasters, Property, and Politics

Between holiday travels and holiday activities, we found it best to be on a bit of a hiatus here at DPP. We hope all our readers had a happy holiday season, and are finding the New Year to be all they would like it to be.

And we are ready to get back to blogging.

The Supreme Court is back in session and busy, busy, busy. We’ll keep an eye on that and inform you of what happens as the information becomes available. In the meantime, Logan has an update on the Mt. Holly case below, which settled in November. Oral arguments on Brandt, the case involving easements that could impact Rails-to-Trails and other such programs, are scheduled for this month. For review purposes, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s our posts on Brandt (here and here).

The Court is also scheduled to hear oral arguments in February in a case involving EPA rules on gas emissions. I’ll be posting a discussion of that shortly, along with some links to other discussions of the case. This case represents a foray by the Court into debates about climate change and to what extent the federal government can limit “greenhouse gases”. Since climate change and natural disasters have been linked in multiple ways by scientists, we think this case deserves some scrutiny.

That’ll get us started for the New Year — looking forward to a lot of writing in 2014!

In two previous posts I discussed a case, Mt. Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc., which was to be argued before the Supreme Court. The case was settled before arguments before the Court were made, and on November 13, 2012 the Court dismissed the grant of certiorari (pursuant to rule 46). The terms of the settlement require Mount Holly Township to build 44 homes in the blighted area (for details see my earlier post, here), including 20 for families living in the Gardens. Additionally, the township will provide financial compensation to families who chose to leave the neighborhood. Perhaps most importantly, no citizens will be forced to leave the community to make room for redevelopment. Olga Palmer, one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs, said “This is what the plaintiffs have always wanted: to be able to stay in their community once it’s been revitalized” (quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer). The settlement, of course, means that the Court will not be revisiting the disparate impact claim I discussed in the earlier post. By all accounts, the settlement represents a clear victory for the citizens of Mount Holly Gardens. Palmer argues that problems like the one faced by the Mount Holly community could be avoided in the future by adopting inclusive redevelopment strategies and policies that do not “forcibly push out people from the community where they live” (quoted in an audio slideshow published at SCOTUSblog).