Eaton Feels Your Pain
Kenneth Eaton, who received a third of a percent of the vote in the August 2007 Mayoral race, is at it again, this time in his bid for the US Senate.
Mr. Eaton is returning to a painful issue in his past, in 2003 he first started running for office after his North Nashville car lot was taken for "low rent" housing and he blamed then Mayor Bill Purcell. Now, another Nashvillian is facing the prospects of being forced to sell her property at the behest of urban progress:
Joy Ford is a strong, independent woman who has helped many aspiring singers and musicians over the years from her small office building off Demonbreun Street, near Music Row. A huge Houston Developer, the Lionstone Group, wants her property so they can build a $100 million office, condo and hotel complex on Demonbreun.
Democratic Senatorial [candidate] Kenneth Eaton feels her pain. Back in 2001 Eaton's auto dealership, which he had owned and operated for 32 years, was taken from him by eminent domain. The legal argument was that the property was better suited for low cost housing. Instead of low-cost housing, condos now selling for $250,000 each were built on that property.
"This is nothing more than a land grab," says Eaton about the Joy Ford property. "And to make things even worse, this is a case of metro government shafting a local property owner for the benefit of a Texas company!"
The pitfalls of an urban city, at some point, old buildings have to make way for the new...best of luck for Joy in getting as much money as possible for her house.
2 comments:
haha "The pitfalls of an urban city, at some point, old buildings have to make way for the new"
That is the best you can come up with? This woman is getting screwed by the governement because they want more property tax from her land than she is willing to develop. This is pathetic and should be stopped.
Perhaps the best way for Joy to get "as much money as possible for her house" is to have a desirous developer do what developers did before local governments found "eminent domain" to be synonymous with "do what we want" --- offer her money for it.
Eminent domain guarantees that she doesn't receive market value since a monopolist, in this case the government, makes for poor markets. No one disagrees that at "at some point" buildings are replaced. The point of disagreement is that some of us think the owner should have some input in determining when that point is.
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