He grew up in Yonkers but lives on Park Avenue in Manhattan and says that what made him the county's pre-eminent developer — he is revitalizing downtowns in New Rochelle and Yonkers as well — is that "I've got the New York City mentality but I'm a Westchester guy".
The city-as-monoculture can only continue with surveillance, stop-and-frisks, eminent domain, developer tax windfalls and all the illegal activity brazenly called Progress and New York Greatness and The Future by the teleprompter readers.
Opposition to the Kelo decision was part of the 2016 Republican platform – even though Donald Trump, rather infamously, attempted to use economic development eminent domain laws to his own benefit as a real estate developer.
Even the pre-eminent 20th-century ski developer Intrawest – whose resorts always had a shopping-centre element – failed to spot the retail potential of the slopes.
Any property within the designated area is subject to eminent domain, where the developers have the right to purchase the property for fair market value and raze it to make way for the planned development.
Ms. Gill said that although she and Ms. Allen were trying to use widespread grass-roots concern about eminent domain to cajole developers into making compromises, "it won't be a cakewalk".
Fresh Kills was conceived in the 1940's by the city's pre-eminent bridge and highway developer, Robert Moses, who envisioned using garbage as a foundation under the approach system for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that he planned to build between Staten Island and Brooklyn.
"Developers love eminent domain because they don't have to bother with negotiating for property.
Mr. Spann's father, also named Johnny, is the pre-eminent real estate agent and developer in town.
In 1989, the Ambassador was closed, sold to Donald Trump and a group of developers, and then "eminent domained" by the school district, a proceeding that took more than a decade.
"We really feel like, out of the glare of the cameras, we have to sit down with him and his colleagues and ask, which is the real Rudy Giuliani?" In his address to the Federalist Society, Mr. Giuliani spoke against racial quotas and the use of eminent domain to enrich private developers.
