Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
If someone said "the reason why my pants are 36 waist is that I've put on a little weight since college" I wouldn't say "This incorrect. Pant waist size means the number that a hypothetical tape measure would read when measuring around the waistband." Causal graphs are not just sets of ordered pairs, and when one effect has multiple causes sometimes the most proximal cause is not the only or even the most important cause.
But, to abandon brevity for clarity: the reason why the property was worth $2.9M instead of $3.5M is that that is the price that a hypothetical buyer would have paid to buy the properties, and the reason why that price was the former rather than the latter was because:
If they could have cancelled the lease early, or even if a cancellation after purchase could have been done without penalty, then I would have been incorrect; the existence of the lease would not have notably reduced the price.
Yes; this is what I phrased as "The interest is gone in 2018, sure". I'm just curious about the legal and ethical implications. "Compensation needs to be based on what it would have been in 1994" seems to the intent of the law here; so does that mean that the grocery store would have also been stiffed if the taking had gone through in 1994? If I move to a smaller house and give one of my kids a 30 year rent-free lease on my current house, the market value of my current house afterward might be negative (who else wants to pay property taxes for decades on a house they can't use themselves?); would that mean that if it's eminent domained then my kid is out of luck and I need to pay the taker for the privilege?
Thanks for this!
Because you're not a valuator.
"fair market value (FMV) is the highest price, expressed in cash, at which property would change hands between a hypothetical willing and able buyer and seller, each acting in their own interest in an open market without compulsion to buy or sell, and with reasonable knowledge of all relevant facts"
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The thing that I think you're hung up on here is that you're assuming that a lease interest operates the same as an ownership interest, and that simply isn't the case as far as the law is concerned. A lessee may be entitled to compensation in a condemnation proceeding, especially if, as in this case, there is a long-term lease in operation at below market rates, but this isn't always the case; someone on an annual lease at market rent probably doesn't have a recognizable interest, no matter how inconvenient moving may be. The onus is thus on the lessee to prove to the government that they are entitled to compensation.
The short answer to why ACME wasn't compensated here is that they didn't intervene in the proceeding, didn't pay an expert to find out what their lease interest was worth, and neither the arbitration panel nor the court was in a position to make a determination of their interest. But that doesn't really answer your question; I suspect that had they intervened they wouldn't have gotten anything. The reason, I suspect, would be because eminent domain statutes generally only contemplate owners. Since a lessee would have to show extraordinary circumstances to be entitled to compensation, the what-if game doesn't apply to them. They broke the lease in 1999, could have only extended it to 2012 at the latest, and the building was demolished in 2015. They can't credibly argue that their interests are somehow prejudiced. The owner, obviously, can't either, but there's a statute that applies specifically to them and has to be followed. If the property had been taken in 1994, the grocery store would have had an argument and probably would have intervened in the condemnation suit.
If you're worried about the government being unjustly enriched, this isn't really the case to raise that concern. Their argument was to use the 2018 market value, and by that point the ACME store was razed and the rest of the plaza was dilapidated and vacant. This is what the township wanted to do, as it would have resulted in a much lower price.
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