Opinion of the Court
(noting that these needs were likely to vary depending on a State’s “resources, the capacity of the soil, the relative importance of industries to the general public welfare, and the long established methods and habits of the people”).[1] For more than a century, our public use jurisprudence has wisely eschewed rigid formulas and intrusive scrutiny in favor of affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.
IV
Those who govern the City were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference. The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including—but by no means limited to—new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development,[2] the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To ef-
- ↑ See also Clark, 198 U. S., at 367–368; Strickley v. Highland Boy Gold Mining Co., 200 U. S. 527, 531 (1906) (“In the opinion of the legislature and the Supreme Court of Utah the public welfare of that State demands that aerial lines between the mines upon its mountain sides and railways in the valleys below should not be made impossible by the refusal of a private owner to sell the right to cross his land. The Constitution of the United States does not require us to say that they are wrong”); O’Neill v. Leamer, 239 U. S. 244, 253 (1915) (“States may take account of their special exigencies, and when the extent of their arid or wet lands is such that a plan for irrigation or reclamation according to districts may fairly be regarded as one which promotes the public interest, there is nothing in the Federal Constitution which denies to them the right to formulate this policy or to exercise the power of eminent domain in carrying it into effect. With the local situation the state court is peculiarly familiar and its judgment is entitled to the highest respect”).
- ↑ Cf. Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U. S. 365 (1926).
