New Haven Independent

I did not immediately take to Jeff Benedict’s Little Pink House (Grand Central Publishing; January, 2009). I’ve been reading lots of Wallace Stevens lately, and in comparison, Benedict’s writing felt plain. The facts were presented very straightforwardly―which I should have expected, I guess, because Benedict is a journalist. But I read on, and eventually this became one of those books I could not wait to get back to.

Little Pink House is the true story of a blue-collar Connecticut woman, Susette Kelo, whose prolonged fight to protect her home attracted national attention and public outrage. Kelo, a resident of Connecticut’s shoreline, bought and refurbished a house in New London. She then spent a decade warding off attempts by the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), under the charge of Connecticut College president Claire Gaudiani, to seize her house by eminent domain. Working with lawyers and municipal officials, Gaudiani decided it would benefit New London to bring a large corporate headquarters there—and so she went viciously after Pfizer.

It made sense in principle. Gaudiani’s vision for New London entailed a radically expanded tax base, due largely to the workforce Pfizer would bring in. But Gaudiani, the NLDC and their allies had little r egard for the interests of a group of homeowners whose property stood in the way. Moreover, the homeowners felt the NLDC had little regard for the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ restrictions on governmental use of eminent domain.

Plainspoken and microphone-shy, Kelo suddenly found herself at the center of a storm. After refusing all cash offers for her property, Kelo and a group of similarly threatened neighbors enlisted the support of attorney Scott Bullock and others at the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C. Just as the NLDC and the City of New London had assembled teams of politically powerful players in hopes of achieving their aims, Kelo had built a team of her own. Armed with support, Kelo fought hard.

Claiming that securing land for Pfizer did not constitute public use, the homeowners sued the City of New London and lost: the Supreme Court of Connecticut found that using eminent domain for economic development was perfectly constitutional, on both state and federal levels. Bringing Pfizer to New London constituted a public use because doing so would result in job creation, greater tax revenues and urban revitalization. The court also found that governmental delegation of eminent domain power to a private entity was constitutional.

Kelo and her neighbors appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court and again lost. Following oral arguments on February 22, 2005, the court issued a 5-4 decision in favor of the City of New London. The ruling was unpopular and attracted lots of ridicule. Kelo and her neighbors eventually accepted buyout offers, but their story sparked lots of change across the nation, including congressional legislation and an executive order from then-President Bush prohibiting the federal government from using eminent domain “merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.” And by the summer of 2007, 42 states had acted to change legislation to protect against abuse of the power by municipalities.

Benedict jumps from plotline to plotline―Kelo to Gaudiani then back to Kelo, for instance―with agility. His fact-based journalistic style is clear and strong enough to keep the reader from getting lost in what becomes a web-like plot. Like a good novel, this book, though plot-heavy, is also character-driven: one feels one knows Kelo, Bullock, Gaudiani, and the others after reading about them. Where Gaudiani and others in her camp are portrayed as powerful and smart but uncaring, Kelo is a sympathetic character, a perpetual underdog with unending determination.

Kelo encounters obstacle after obstacle while fighting to keep her home. While she ultimately loses, her struggle is as inspiring as it is angering. And Benedict’s account of it is thorough, well-related and entirely gripping. With Little Pink House, Benedict has captured not only the complexities of an important constitutional principle, but also the havoc and ruin that arrogant governing can bring about.