RALEIGH – Government exists primarily to protect individual rights from encroachment by force or fraud.
Identifying a forceful violation of rights isn’t usually difficult to do, and most people understand why it is good to minimize the use of coercion in human relationships. But fraudulent violations of rights can be trickier. Even if the terms of a contract are spelled out, did both parties understand them in the same way? Are there certain facts and conditions so basic to a fair and enforceable contract that it is reasonable for public authorities to require their inclusion and disclosure in any agreement?
Longtime Greensboro News & Record reporter Taft Wireback wrote Sunday about an interesting case, the real-estate developments built in the path of the upcoming northern part of the Urban Loop around the Gate City. It appears that some recently built homes are going to have to be torn down to complete the project.
Because major highways can take years to plan, and decades to complete, it would be entirely unworkable to forbid all development on private land that might, at some future point, be affected by the construction or operation of a highway. As my old friend Marlene Sanford, head of the Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, told Wireback: “If we were a socialist state, they could say, ‘We’re going to build a road through your property at some point in the future; therefore, you can’t do anything with it now.’ But we aren’t.”
The solution, it seems to me, is to require that all sellers of real estate disclose any planned highway corridors affecting their properties to potential buyers. Knowing that, buyers can make up their own minds about whether any potential negative effects on the enjoyment of their property are outweighed by the positives. If not, they might well insist on a lower price, or forgo the transaction.
At the same time, government planners must have a duty to disclose immediately any changes in transportation or other policies that are likely to affect real-estate development. That seems to have been a major factor in the Greensboro case, Wireback reports:
Problems at Quail Oaks and several other places along the loop’s future route stem from changes in Federal Highway Administration standards, which have forced the loop outside its original pathway. Other problem areas include the loop’s interchange at North Elm Street, a stretch between Lawndale Avenue and Old Battleground Road, and the nearby Battleground Avenue interchange.
Federal design, safety and environmental rules require DOT to either take more land or use a slightly different route than specified in these trouble spots 13 years ago, when the state filed the loop’s official “corridor protection map” with Guilford County officials.
Perhaps existing laws already require such disclosures, but they just weren’t followed in the case of Greensboro’s Urban Loop. That would surprise me. Government does, indeed, exist primarily to protect us from encroachments by force or fraud – but it’s so busy encroaching on our rights itself that it scarcely has time to do its job.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation