Post #3108896

2026-04-22 14:46 UTC

It's just eminent domain in the USA. You get together and you march up to the property and tell them that the city (you) have a better use for it than their private ownership. You might be legally required to provide them a pittance for the land, but you get to mark it as repossessed beforehand, making its price plummet nearly to zero. In practice, that's only used to cut out people's front yards to make space for a road, and to bulldoze housing for the poor. But if people of the city actually started calling themselves "the city" rather than bowing and scraping to smug tyrants, there's very much a legal precedent!

Replies (2)

@douginamug@mastodon.xyz 2026-04-22 14:55

@cy @resl@mas.to there's a citizens initiative in Berlin (which is a "city-state" with some devolved powers) to pass a "socialization" law that would leverage dispossession powers outlined in the constitution https://dwenteignen.de/en/aktuelles/stand-der-kampagne fingers crossed it goes through

Open ##3108897
@rey@toot.cat 2026-04-22 14:57

@cy @resl@mas.to so this reminds me of a fun thing happening here: my city eminent-domain'd a parcel of land for $8 million, intending to build a new public unsafety building to house the cops the previous owners sued because they said they could have gotten more than that on the open market, so now the city had to pay a total of $30 million based on the court decision this took all the money they were going to use to construct the pig sty, so the city is now trying to sell the land to recoup at least some of the investment and, following all this, it turns out the assessed/market value of the land is $3 million

Open ##3108898