It’s hard to imagine a Supreme Court decision more fraught for New Yorkers than that handed down yesterday in Kelo et al v. City of New London et al, in which the court signaled that no property is safe from the government seizing it for vague “economic development” purposes. The case involves nine property-owners in Connecticut, including Susette Kelo, who are trying to prevent the government from using its constitutional power of eminent domain to take their property from them. The owners would be compensated financially, but they would have to move elsewhere.

Kelo turned on the Fifth Amendment, which provides, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” At issue is whether economic development constituted a “public use” under the Constitution. In the 5-to-4 ruling, it was the justices generally considered the conservatives – Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and O’Connor – who sided with the property owners. The liberal justices – Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer – sided with the city, bringing Justices Souter and Kennedy along with them.

The irony, as in so many instances, is that it’s the so-called liberals who are siding with the rich and powerful, and the so-called conservatives who are defending the poor and the downtrodden. “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory,” Justice O’Connor writes in her stinging dissent issued yesterday.

“Any property,” she writes, “may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.”

Justice Thomas made a similar argument in his separate dissent. He writes that “losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful.” He quotes one history reporting that “urban renewal” came to be known as “Negro removal” and another reporting that in Michigan, the largely low-income and elderly residents of Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood were uprooted for the benefit of General Motors.

All this is something to think about for a city like New York, which is in the midst of historic battles for the West Side of Manhattan, for much of downtown Brooklyn, for projects in the Bronx and Staten Island. New Yorkers have just watched owners of perfectly good commercial buildings in Midtown have their property taken so an office tower could be built to build fancier offices whence the editorial writers of the New York Times can declaim on corruption in Albany.

We don’t gainsay the logic of eminent domain entirely. The founders of America knew they had a nation to build. But eminent domain is sort of like the H-bomb. It’s something you don’t want to get into the habit of using or use for the wrong reasons – a prospect that, in the case of eminent domain, is more likely now than before the court ruled yesterday.