This kind of effort is based on years of work by people in both parties who were willing to be candid about the failures of the past and who shared a common dream for a better urban future. It is being replicated in states and cities across the country.
Melrose Commons demonstrates that we have found a much more effective way to restore deteriorated communities, leveraging private investment, know-how and efficiency to avoid the sterile bureaucratic government programs of the past. And we have seen a flowering of these efforts across America, led by such inspired nonprofits as Habitat for Humanity, Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Enterprise.
The bill adopted by the House should include provisions for neighborhoods with significant blight and crime. Currently it arbitrarily pronounces that a project using eminent domain to build public housing is acceptable, while privately financed and developed affordable housing is not.
We need also be mindful of the lessons of our recent past. We must resist creating unresponsive government bureaucracies. We should be careful not to create a whole new cadre of Washington bureaucrats, perhaps even a National Land Use Board, to decide if each local project across the country violates the new federal eminent-domain law.
Careful federal eminent domain legislation can be justified and beneficial if it ensures that when federal funds are used a project using eminent domain follows rigorous procedures under state law that ensure effective public notice, full public hearings and reviews, detailed findings and development plans, and adequate compensation for homeowners and business owners. Perhaps a state ombudsman should be available to assist aggrieved landowners, as has been successfully pioneered in Utah and now adopted in other states.
Whatever Congress does, it must be sensitive to the balance of our federal system and not seek to remedy one troublesome problem by overriding the effectiveness of states' powers and responsibilities in areas where they can best operate to the ultimate goal of bringing affordable housing and homeownership opportunities to our blighted urban pockets of poverty.