[ms_ann_thrope]

Not entirely. It's more of a balancing between my rights as a property owner and the needs of the community and geographic imperatives (i.e., due to fault lines and soil types, the essential highway can ONLY be safely built if it runs through my living room).

I know that even if the state were to seize my property for some vital public works project, private enterprise would profit because some of the work would undoubtedly be contracted out to private companies. That's not where I have the problem. My issue is with the state using eminent domain to turn over my private property to another private owner based on the argument/assumption that the new private owner is going to do something more "useful" with the land than I am. Believing as I do that my home is an inviolate bastion of my liberty, to force me to surrender it would be like a rape.

If a developer wants to pay me and all my neighbors a bunch of money to buy our homes and then raze them to build the Starbucks and the condos, fine, maybe the developer will get lucky and there won't be any holdouts and they can build whatever they please and in so doing 'benefit' the community by bringing Frappuccinos and a finite amount of new housing to the neighborhood. Using the awesome power of eminent domain to secure my lot for commercial development is not, IMHO, what was intended in the Fifth Amendment.