I missed this story last week, but apparently Pfizer is abandoning its New London headquarters, and the land that it used the power of government to steal from Kelo et al. now lays fallow.
Susette Kelo’s little, pink house in New London, Conn. — like the houses of all her neighbors — is now a pile of rubble, overgrown with weeds. But Pfizer, the company that called for the demolition in order to build a new research and development plant, announced Monday it is packing up and leaving town in order to cut costs after its merger with fellow drug-giant Wyeth.
[…]
The Fort Trumbull neighborhood Pfizer had bulldozed today consists only of “weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters,” according to the Associated Press. Nobody has built the high-rise hotel or the luxury condos the city’s planners had envisioned. The credit crunch and housing collapse took the air of out of that grand plan.
And Pfizer’s sparkling R&D facility that was supposed to anchor the city’s “rejuvenation?” It’s being shuttered as a cost-saving measure following Pfizer’s merger with Wyeth. Some of the 1,400 jobs there will move across the river to Groton. Some will be terminated.
The best-laid plans of central planners, it seems, have once again gone awry-unless you look at it from Pfizer’s perspective.
The Hartford Courant reports Pfizer may sell the building and the land, which it got for nearly nothing. Or it may lease it out. So, the drug giant still gets the profits from the government’s taking. But for New London? No more R&D jobs. No development of Fort Trumbull. Just some rubble where families once lived.
Despicable.
Update: I was on vacation last week, so I totally missed the fact that Steve Verdon covered this already. Still, we can keep being mad, right?
Brookins cartoon courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch via Doug Mataconis.
