At issue is New London's decision to seize and demolish private homes in the Fort Trumbull area to make way for commercial development. It has been six months since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that New London could do what it did. But private residents are still living in their homes.

To frame the deep, constitutional issues at stake, here is a quote from the Washington Post:
"To enhance the Pfizer pharmaceutical company's $270 million research facility, it empowered a private entity, the New London Development Corp., to exercise the power of eminent domain to condemn most of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood along the Thames River. The aim is to make space for expensive condominiums, a luxury hotel and private offices that would yield the city more tax revenue than can be extracted from the neighborhood's middle-class homeowners.

"The question is: Does the Constitution empower governments to seize a person's most precious property--a home, a business--and give it to more wealthy interests so that the government can reap, in taxes, ancillary benefits of that wealth? Connecticut's court says yes, which turns the Fifth Amendment from a protection of the individual against overbearing government into a license for government to coerce individuals on behalf of society's strongest interests. Henceforth, what home or business will be safe from grasping governments pursuing their own convenience?

"But the Fifth Amendment says, among other things: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Every state constitution also stipulates takings only for "public use." The framers of the Bill of Rights used language carefully; clearly they intended the adjective "public" to restrict government takings to uses that are directly owned or primarily used by the general public, such as roads, bridges or public buildings.

"The Connecticut court, like the courts of six other states, says the "public use" restriction does not really restrict takings at all. It merely means a taking must have some anticipated public benefit, however indirect and derivative, at the end of some chain of causation. Hence New London can evict Ms. Wilhelmina Dery from the home in which she has lived since her birth there in 1918." (End of quote.)

As in communities everywhere, New London government leaders and staffs say that they must have the riverfront project to foster jobs and businesses in the face of economic decline.

But Fort Trumbull property owners (residents) have fought back and, of late, have raised the public conscience on the public vs. private question. The whole issue has turned into a battle royal that has spread across the nation. Will it be eviction notices, wrecking balls, or some compromise between the warring factions?

The town says it must develop new sources of revenue; the affected residents say "not on my property."