Abusing powers of condemnation

Old Dominion University's plans to buy and redevelop several blocks southeast of campus sat dormant for more than 11 years. Now, as the legal exemption allowing the city to condemn the properties is set to expire at the end of June, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority is in a mad dash.

Last week, the authority's board of commissioners set in motion the legal machinery to take four properties, which will displace two more industrial businesses.

So much is wrong with this plan and this process: NRHA is selling its condemnation powers for a 4 percent commission. It's misleading the courts about why it's taking the properties. It's undercutting long-standing businesses by failing to offer a fair price for their properties. And it's favoring one type of business - upscale shops and housing - over another.

NRHA is going to court to force the sale of properties between 38th and 41st streets and Hampton Boulevard and Killam Avenue not for student housing, which ODU needs, but so the university can turn the area into a mixed-use development of shops, restaurants and apartments.

Virginia law expressly prohibits government confiscations for economic development. It allows the government to condemn property if it is for public use, for a public utility or if the property is blighted. NRHA's proposals don't meet even one of those conditions.

In the area ODU has targeted for its expanded University Village, most of the property is not blighted. In fact, three of the most recent properties in NRHA's sights - Norfolk Machine and Welding Inc., Norva Plastics and Central Radio - are small, taxpaying businesses. Their only sins are that they don't fit the city of Norfolk's vision of economic success, and they're in ODU's way.

Norfolk Machine and Welding is a 32-year-old industrial machinery repair company. Norva Plastics, established 35 years ago, is a fabricator and supplier specializing in suicide prevention products. Central Radio, a 76-year-old military contractor, installs and repairs electronic equipment in a building constructed specifically for it.

Ironically, Norfolk can't seem to move fast enough to condemn three businesses that are no threat to public health and safety, but it's dragging its feet in dealing with deplorable conditions on the other side of the city.

As The Pilot's Meghan Hoyer reported, a truly blighted Norfolk neighborhood of 70 homes - Central Trailer Park - was allowed to deteriorate for years. Residents' long-standing complaints of Third World conditions include backed-up sewage and jack-rigged electrical hookups, missing roofs and windows.

Rather than condemn property that should be condemned, NRHA is taking profitable, tax-generating facilities and turning the land over to ODU's real estate foundation.

That group pays NRHA 4 percent for every property it buys, which means NRHA has a financial interest in condemning Central Radio, Norfolk Machine and Welding and Norva Plastics.

With such an incentive - more than $200,000 for the latest properties - NRHA is not working on the public's behalf; it's working for itself and for developers who will get the property.

The flurry of activity in the last few months is because in 2007, Virginia made it harder for government to condemn property but gave Norfolk two years to finish redevelopment already under way, including University Village. That deadline was subsequently extended until June 30.

If the NRHA and the ODU foundation want to do right by property owners - and right by the law - they will stop trying to rush through condemnation and negotiate in good faith without the hammer of eminent domain.