A Five-Year, State-By-State Report Examining The Abuse Of Eminent Domain
By Dana Berliner
Detroit
In the late 1990s, Detroit decided to build two new stadiums, one each for the Lions football team and the Tigers baseball team. The stadiums would be adjacent to each other along Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit. Land acquisition costs were split between the teams and the City, with the state chipping in an additional $25 million to the effort. The plan called for the stadiums themselves to be jointly owned by the City and the respective teams, with the teams retaining a majority interest.
Over the course of a few months in 1996, the Detroit/Wayne County Stadium Authority reached settlements that gave it title to all but 24 of the properties on the stadium site. The authority then condemned those 24 remaining properties, which comprised about a quarter of the total land for the project, and paid the owners figures equal to what it had originally offered them. Most of the remaining owners did not challenge the government.s authority to take the property, but were not happy with the amount of money offered. The owners asked for millions of dollars more, but the jury disagreed.
Only two owners actually challenged the power of the stadium authority to take the property. Freda Alibri and her family owned and operated Prime Parking LLC on a one-acre lot on Woodward Avenue. The Alibris. property was across the street from both of the new stadiums, and the stadium authority claimed it needed the Alibris. lot for stadium parking. Under the threat of condemnation, the Alibris agreed to sell.
What the authority did not tell the Alibris was that the $264,551 it used to buy their land had actually been loaned to the authority by Mike Ilitch, who owns both the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Red Wings hockey franchise. From the time the City chose the Woodward Avenue site for the Lions and Tigers stadiums.
Ilitch had been quietly acquiring land across the street in hopes of someday building a new hockey arena adjacent to the sports complex. Once the Alibris learned of the loan from Ilitch to the stadium authority, and the fact that the authority was planning to transfer title to the Alibris. land as repayment of the Ilitch loan, the family sued to get their land back.
In August 2000, a judge ruled that at the time the stadium authority sought the Alibris. property, it did not have the power to condemn it. That power was the only reason the Alibris sold. Since there was no power, the sale was invalidated. The judge ordered the stadium authority to transfer the land back to the Alibris.
On appeal, however, the decision was reversed. The appeals court found that the trial court should have looked at the case as an agreement to purchase, rather than as a condemnation. Since the Alibris agreed to sell, and they did not show the existence of fraud, they were bound to honor that agreement.
One other owner was luckier. The stadium authority also filed a condemnation action against a building owned by Joseph Maday. The Womans Exchange Building is separated from the rest of the project area by a church. The authority had no current plans for Maday's property and no idea what it would do with it.
The judge rejected the condemnation, ruling that the taking was unnecessary.
You may want to review these posts:
--The Verifiable Truth:
- State Subsidizing Plans for Detroit Hockey Arena
- Blogger questions Detroit Arena assumptions
- Field of Schemes: Tiger Stadium back in limbo
- Family that built fortune on Detroit Sports and Little Caesars Pizza directed $900k to these political committees while expanding gambling ventures
- As most of Michigan continues to struggle financially, 11 make Forbes List of World's Richest Billionaires
- Taxpayers give Ilitch $95,000 to tear down his building
- City Sells Historic Building to Ilitch for $220,500
- Supreme Court ruled against Ilitch eminent domain scheme
- Ilitch has an insatiable appetite for land in downtown Detroit; see Live.com map of all 170 properties
- Did Ilitch pay $1.73 million for Elizabeth Street Lofts?
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