"Eminent Domain Through the Back Door"

What is happening in the cradle of the modern civil rights movement? Jimmy McCall would like to know. "It was more my dream house," he laments, "and the city tore it down... It reminds me of how they used to mistreat black people in the Old South." In 1955, Rosa Parks took on the whole system of Jim Crow by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus. Today, McCall is waging a lonely battle against the same city government for another civil right: the freedom to build a home on his own land. Though McCall's ambitions are modest, he is exceptionally determined. For years, he has scraped together a living by salvaging rare materials from historic homes and then selling them to private builders. Sometimes months went by before he had a client. Finally, he had put aside enough to purchase two acres in Montgomery and started to build. He did the work himself using materials accumulated in his business including a supply of sturdy and extremely rare longleaf pine. But from the outset, the city showed unremitting hostility. He has almost lost count of the roadblocks it threw up including a citation for keeping the necessary building materials on his own land during the construction process. More seriously, he was charged under the state blight law, which allows a municipality to designate a building as a "public nuisance" and then demolish it. Critics have accurately called this "eminent domain through the back door" and warn that opportunities for abuse are almost limitless. In contrast to the standard eminent domain process, for example, property owners do not have any right to compensation, even in theory. The reaction of Montgomery's city fathers seemed strange to McCall. Wasn't he trying to fight blight by building a new home? McCall suspects that wealthy developers were trying to get their hands on the property: a rare two-acre parcel on a major thoroughfare. Unlike countless others in similar straits, McCall fought back and hired an experienced local lawyer. In the middle of last year, he negotiated a court-enforced agreement, which gave him 18 months to complete the home. Only a month after the agreement took effect, the city demolished the structure. Local bureaucrats, obviously in a hurry to tear it down, did not even give him notice. The bulldozers came in the same day as the court order that authorized them...Reason