https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...
> The village notified her subdivision’s residents that it would use eminent domain to seize their homes if they didn’t accept a relocation offer.
Projects started using eminent domain and destroying lives rarely succeed
Is there data on this? I’ve heard the opposite from admirers of more authoritarian governments, which “get things done” in part by moving quickly because they don’t have to deal with eminent domain proceedings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Pfizer wanted the land and said they would create jobs and give the state more tax revenue, the state said "well that sounds like 'public use' to us," seized the land, bulldozed the houses, wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and then Pfizer picked up and moved out of town.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13pfizer.html
Nothing was built and the property where the homes were demolished still sits vacant:
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kelo-v-new-london/id14...
Compare this to NYC/NY State's now-cancelled but well structured deal for Amazon, where they stood to make a 9:1 return on investment, with only $505m in capital outlays for the public, and that itself was tied to a minimum $3b investment from Amazon, with projected new revenue of $28 billion for the city and state over 25 years (https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/18098589/amazon-hq2-nyc-que...). NY gets a lot of flak for mismanagement on other fronts (for example transit infrastructure) but they were able to select the right incentives, terms, and conditions to create a highly favorable subsidy deal that wouldn't have left them high and dry if the company changed direction.
My conclusion from all this being - it doesn't make sense to demonize either subsidies or eminent domain or whatever else, as much as it does to just demand competence.
It's easy for politicians and companies to make nice PR statements about theoretical jobs that will be created but reality frequently doesn't live up to it
These sort of subsidizes should be banned. Cities should complete on infrastructure and we'll educated work force not giveaways
Personally, I don't think subsidies should be banned, because public agencies must be allowed the freedom to make smart business decisions when the opportunities arise. The one danger I see is that big corporations that can navigate the legal and political landscape may have better access to these deals than a smaller player, which stifles competition. To fix that, my suggestion is that any subsidy deal should also be made available in some smaller scaled-down form to smaller competitors.
They have the possibility of doing things quickly, but also by its nature they aren't subject to much transparency, review, criticism, or accurately reporting results.... thus they really don't even have to be very good or fair about it ...
Mussolini didn't actually make the trains run on time; he only convinced people he did.
Others, such as Mussolini's, just use the authority to give fat contracts to corporations they have friends in and aestheticize the solution.
It's a real risk.
In 2013, Foxconn promised to spend $30 million over two years building a robotics manufacturing facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that would have employed five hundred people. They also planned to invest $10 million into R&D at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as part of the arrangement. In return, the state, county, and city offered Foxconn tax incentives and property improvements. Seven years after the ribbon cutting ceremony, the property is still an empty lot and CMU never received the investment.
On the plus side, nobody's home was seized as they were in Wisconsin.