Squashing the riffraff, New York Times style

By DEROY MURDOCK
Scripps Howard News Service
October 24, 2002

NEW YORK - "Boycott the Times! Boycott the Times!" chanted angry members of the Manhattan Libertarian Party outside New York Times headquarters. Their Oct. 20 protest was a refreshing response to what organizer Richard Cooper calls "Time$cam" - the paper's legalized theft of other people's property.

The Times wants to build a 52-story office tower nearby on Eighth Avenue. Inconveniently, that land already hosts about 30 companies in 11 different buildings. Rather than purchase these parcels from individual owners, the Old Gray Lady unleashed the Empire State Development Corporation on them. This government agency used its powers of eminent domain to seize their property and deliver it to America's "paper of record."

The U.S. and state constitutions allow officials to take private property for public purposes, provided the owners receive "just compensation." This traditionally meant that if private property obstructed a highway, military base or other government project, its owner could be bought out for the public's benefit. The Founding Fathers never envisioned government abusing this authority to transfer one owner's hard-earned land to the private portfolio of another.

The Times has handled this with characteristic arrogance. In an Oct. 25, 2001 article, staff writer David W. Dunlap described this site as "a shabby blend of sex shops, prostitution, loitering, and drug dealing that scarcely welcomes the world to the new Times Square."

No one would confuse this block with a stretch of Madison Avenue boutiques. Still, it houses stable businesses, some of which are fighting in court to stay put. Prominent tenants include designer Donna Karan's home license unit and Arnold Hatters, purveyors of the hats featured in Mel Brooks' side-splitting musical, "The Producers." The suits Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney wore at their husbands' inauguration contained material from B&J Fabrics, tenants since 1958.

Second, the Times could have bought this land from its owners. In fact, it "did not speak with individual property owners," spokesman Toby Usnik told the New York Sun's Julia Levy. "We're not developers, and we're not interested in being developers," Usnik added. "We're a media company."

Instead, the Times and its partner, Forest City Ratner Companies, had the ESD condemn these properties. "We will require you to relocate within the next few months," declared an Aug. 19 ESD letter to tenants. It also told them to redirect their rent payments to the ESD in the interim. These companies' landlords, meanwhile, must pay their mortgages without the benefit of cash-flow from their occupants' rent checks!

Finally, the Times' taxpayer-subsidized sweetheart deal would make Donald Trump grind his teeth in envy. Its full exposure for the land is capped at $85 million, "at least a 25 percent discount," M.I.T. real estate finance professor W. Tod McGrath estimated in the Village Voice. ("We are purchasing the lease at fair market value," Times spokesman Toby Usnik insists.) Any excess acquisition costs may be claimed as credits against 85 percent of rent payments to EDS in lieu of property taxes. The Times and Ratner secured $21.6 million in additional state and local tax breaks. And as the Times' David Dunlap reported, the building will include 40 percent more square footage than zoning regulations normally allow.

"The New York Times is obviously making out, and who's suffering?" Arnold Hatters' Mark Rubin wonders after steam-blocking a customer's new fedora by hand. "The local businessmen. The lower and middle class. The guys that are here working six, seven days a week to make ends meet. We are the ones that are being displaced and inconvenienced and ripped off."

In a March report for the libertarian Institute for Justice - a Washington-based, legal foundation - Dana Berliner illustrated how large corporations routinely have government snatch private property on their behalf. To erect a parking structure, eight Las Vegas casinos orchestrated the condemnation of a commercial building an elderly widow's husband purchased to finance her retirement. The city of Hurst, Texas, forced 10 couples from their homes to speed the expansion of a private mall. Among these 20 people, four suffered heart attacks and three died during ensuing litigation.

Such human suffering should have made the sensitive liberals at the New York Times weep. Instead, they checked their balance sheets and got in on the action.

(New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va.)