Comments Elsewhere

M. E. Hoffer,

They do not want the land to be “undeveloped.” They want their own development of it (viz., productive gardens that they’d been raising for 14 years, and which fed about 350 families) not to be bulldozed. As it happens, they have been trying to raise money to pay off Horowitz for the land. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to meet his asking price (which he jacked up at the last minute after they managed to meet his initial price through some foundation grants).

However, since Horowitz has no moral claim to the land, this money should at the most be considered a ransom, not a payment for something that Horowitz owns.

Jim,

As I mentioned in my article, Horowitz did not own all of the land that the city “sold” him. The real estate investment firm in which he was a partner owned about 80% of the lot. So even if he had a right to demand the land itself back, he would at the most have a claim to a fraction of that 80%, not to the entire lot. Sources such as the L.A. Times which portray Horowitz as the original owner of the land prior to the 1985 government theft of it are either ignorant of the details or else lying.

Vince,

I’m not disputing that the government recognizes Horowitz and not the farmers as entitled to the land. I just don’t care.

The details of government law in this matter are irrelevant as anything other than historical trivia; from the standpoint of justice they are no different from the details of a case under pirates’ codes or highwaymen’s compacts.

Horowitz has a right to demand restitution for the land theft in 1985 but at this point he does not have any right to demand even his share of the land back, let alone land that he never owned in the first place. He has a moral right to demand restitution from the city officials who stole the land from him, but no right to recover the specific land now that it has been homesteaded and transformed by other people (the farmers, not the city gov’t) for over a decade. It is as if I had discovered a cache of pirates’ loot, and then used it to buy myself a car; and then you, rather than seeking restitution from the pirates who stole it from you, called in the police to repossess my car.

Jim,

(1) Horowitz doesn’t have any claim to the entire lot, but rather only to a share of it, as mentioned before.

(2) Whatever Horowitz’s “intentions” were, he had abandoned the property for sixteen years before taking the city to court in order to force them to “sell” it to him in 2001. Whatever justifications he could, in theory, have given for his demands, his actual public actions indicate that he had no effective intentions to use the land for anything from 1985-2003 because he did not consider himself the owner of the land. His argument is not that he rightfully owned the land all along, but rather that he now owns it because the city “sold” it to him as (he holds) they were obligated to do under terms set down during the eminent domain seizure.

The land was abandoned property in 1994 when the farmers homesteaded it. The city never had any rights to it, of course, and at the time Horowitz and the other owners had at that point effectively quitclaimed their ownership of it for nine years. If the farmers had never showed up and transformed the land, Horowitz would have a perfect right to take his share of the land back as the restitution for the theft from him. But since they did, and since it was abandoned at the time, it now rightly belongs to them, and his only legitimate claim is against the city officials who took it from him twenty years ago.