New York has an ambitious plan to remake Willets Point, Queens, best known as home of the Mets' Shea Stadium (which will come down after two more seasons). The 14-block area has no residents to speak of, and is made up mostly of low-end and frequently shady auto parts and repair businesses. The city, though, has a plan to bring in two to three billion dollars in private investment, "including one million square feet in retail space, a hotel, and a convention center." The Times reports that "Mr. Bloomberg said it would not be hard for the city to make a case for acquiring the privately owned land through eminent domain."

The area is blighted, though, because its infrastructure is shot. Incredibly, the city hasn't connected most of its properties with the sewer system. In short, the mayor is threatening to use eminent domain to force out business owners whose properties are blighted because the city has failed to provide adequate services—and he'd do so on behalf of new private owners, who'd be expected to pay out the actual settlements to the current area residents who'd be forced to vacate.

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The way the game of building anything of scale built in New York these days—and nearly everything that's built is aimed at the middle of the market and up—is to throw in some form or another of subsidizing housing that can be labeled affordable, which placates both the Bloomberg administration, which frequently touts the number of subsiddies units that have gone up under its watch, and the affordable housing advocates, who after 60 years of endless crisis and subsidy continue to insist that the problem could be solved if only more money were thrown at it.

There's an accidentally hilarious quote in a Times article on the plan from one such activist, who seems utterly unaware (as do the writer and whatever editors saw the piece) that there are literally no residents in the neighborhood, only businesses—

But Mercedes Narciso, a senior planner at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, said the proposed redevelopment “has the potential to generate growth in an equitable manner.” She said the city needed to make sure that at least half of the housing units were for people of moderate and low incomes and that the community benefited from hiring guarantees.

It appears the mayor agrees that in order to save the community, first it must be evicted, a point Jarrett Murphy made last year in this worthwhile dispatch on the area in the Village Voice.

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To be sure, Willets Point could and ought to put much more into the city's coffers, and there's no good reason for such small-scale businesses to occupy such potentially valuable land. Why doesn't the city, then, fix the pothole-ridden roads and connect it to the sewage system? Presumably, this would attract new owners and more arguably presentable and certainly profitable businesses.

The question is the same as with affordable housing: Why not let the market work?