Feather-Craft et al v. Brentwood ($436M Manchester Corridor Blight/Eminent Domain Suit)
The Institute for Justice, representing four family-owned Manchester Corridor businesses and a property-owning family in Brentwood, Missouri, is appealing a St. Louis County Circuit Court ruling that upheld the city's blight designation covering 75 parcels along Manchester Road -- a designation that clears the way for the city to condemn the properties via eminent domain and hand them to private developer Green Street for a $436 million mixed-use redevelopment. Judge Kristine Allen Kerr held the blight question was "fairly debatable" and deferred to the city's legislative determination; the plaintiffs argue that standard effectively guts a 2006 Missouri Legislature reform meant to curb blight abuse after Kelo v. New London.
Why it matters
A live test of how much bite Missouri's post-Kelo blight-reform statute actually has: if a city can satisfy it merely by pointing to peeling paint and cracked pavement on some parcels within a much larger district, the statute does little to constrain a blight designation used as a predicate for a straightforwardly private economic-development taking. CRE owners and tenants anywhere in a city-designated redevelopment area, not just in Missouri, should treat a pending blight study as an active threat to their occupancy, not a bureaucratic formality, and should build a documented maintenance record precisely because "fairly debatable" evidence of deterioration is apparently enough to sustain a taking.
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