Blighted? Really?

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: In my Missouri neighborhood, the Enhanced Enterprise Zone is bringing together lefties and Tea Party Patriots in one big tent. Abbreviated “EEZ,” which implies that this is the easy way for job creators to land HERE. The county commission has drawn a line around 170 square miles and declared that it is blighted. The “zone” includes everyone in my neighborhood, from the wrecked trailers to the half-million dollar McMansion where a retired Air Force guy lives. Developers can benefit from a bunch of tax abatements if they come HERE and build something. Big box store chains are the usual beneficiaries, truck stops, or multinational hotel chains. You see these shiny new, plastic-faced, conglomerates along interstate highways. Hogging all the land, they suck the life from downtowns. In fact, the little downtown guy who’s paid taxes for years is the victim. Operating in a non-EEZ, his taxes go up, to cover the land that’s been “tax abated.” Tax abatement first appeared in my county when the economic development boys decided we needed a golf course. They declared a cow pasture blighted because it only had two buildings, cow barns, and those were in rough shape. Us local yokels couldn’t figure it out—all our cow shelters are in rough shape, the way the cows like them. When a cow wants more ventilation, she just pushes out a wall, easy shmeazy. Done! The farmer did OK on the sale. As a prosperous son of an entrepreneurial father, the family holdings were and are still vast. But who was the real winner? The developers, of course. And the losers? Taxpayers. First of all, if the point is to build a new tax base, it’s stupid to begin by exempting developers from the increased taxes they could create. Secondly, it puts a double burden on the taxpayers that pay for the extra services to the new developments. Ask any sheriff – he pays more visits to homes, even luxurious ones, than he pays to cow pastures. And, of course, human children use more schools than bovine children, have more emergencies, need more services. Thirdly, and most important, this kind of enterprise takes rights from property owners who have cared for the land in the past. While the zones may be created by the most careful county fathers, the zones are in existence for a long time, usually 25 years. The definition of “blighted,” which is pretty shaky as it stands today, can change. EEZs have been, up to recently, an urban problem as developers march into a neighborhood. In St. Louis, one tidy neighborhood of family bungalows was bulldozed to make way for a sporting-goods store. Insulted when their small homes were condemned as blighted, the elderly homeowners argued that their homes were full of memories, but progress doesn’t listen to that kind of argument.