Honolulu Lite
I'm really hoping that the city's use of eminent domain to condemn four Waikiki properties so they can be sold to hotel giant Outrigger goes through, because I've got my eye on my neighbor's house and I envision a sweet deal buying that baby down the road. When eminent domain
is imminentA lot of people are whining because Mayor Jeremy Harris and the City Council are using the power of eminent domain to force private landowners to sell their property to the city, which will then sell it to Outrigger so it can build a huge, cool tourist development around its current hotel.
Eminent domain generally is used as a last resort (no pun intended) to obtain property for the public good. Say a sewer pipeline has to go through your back yard and you don't want it to. Tough cookies. The government can use eminent domain to force you to sell the swath of land it needs to put in the pipeline.
Or say you own some really expensive Waikiki property. (You might as well say it because that's as close as you're ever going to come to actually owning it.) That's property that anyone in the world would want to own, like the big hotel next door which has grand expansion plans. But say you don't want to sell to the big hotel next door.
What they teach you in grade school is that, in America, that would be the end of the discussion. What they don't tell you in grade school, or high school or most colleges for that matter, is that the whole concept of private property ownership rights is something of a fiction.
You may make monthly mortgage payments that could choke a real estate lawyer, but ultimately you don't have dominion over your land; the government does.
According to my 45-pound Black's Law Dictionary, which I use every day to prop up a long line of other reference books I never consult, "eminent domain" is simply the right of the state to REASSERT DOMINION over any portion of the soil of the state for the public good.
Eminent domain isn't used often because whenever the government "reasserts dominion" over property, it reminds "landowners" they didn't have dominion over "their property" from the get-go.
Of course, as in the case of the four Waikiki landowners, the government pays fair market price, which is supposed to make everything perfectly fair. The problem is, the government pays the fair market value at the time it wants the property, not the fair market value of, say, 10 years ago, when Japanese investors had driven the cost of Hawaii land through the penthouse roof. Why is it that the government reasserts dominion over private property after the value's been pounded into the basement?
After the Outrigger deal goes through, I'm getting the mayor to condemn my neighbor's property and sell it to me. It is for the public good that I enjoy that view of Kaneohe Bay, you understand.
Alo-Ha! Friday compiles odd bits of news from Hawaii
and the world to get your weekend off to an entertaining start.
Charles Memminger also writes Honolulu Lite Mondays,
Wednesdays and Sundays. Send ideas to him at the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Suite 7-210,
Honolulu 96813, phone 235-6490 or e-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
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