On the November 7, 2006 ballot, California voters will have a chance to vote on the Protect Our Homes Initiative, Proposition 90, which would include significant restrictions on the ability of governments to use eminent domain for economic development purposes and to pass regulations that limit property rights. Why did Prop. 90 get on the ballot, and do California property owners really need its protections?

The story starts last summer, with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Connecticut eminent domain case. For the small but commit group of activists dedicated to eminent domain reforms, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23, 2005 decision in Kelo v. the City of New London (Connecticut) seemed like the darkest day of their long battle. Property rights in the United States were vastly eroded after the high court, in a 5-to-4 ruling, declared that local governments can take property from individual owners and give it to other private owners. The justices ruled that it’s not the court’s job to “second-guess” cities, declaring that the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that takings be for a “public use” had long been a dead letter. “[W]hile the city is not planning to open the condemned land ... to use by the general public,” the court ruled, “this court long ago rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for ... the public.”

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