69 
The use of eminent domain to assist in assembling land could 
provide an effective means of facilitating new community development 
at minimal cost to the State. Indeed, it will, in reality, be necessary in 
order to allow maximum potential employment of private resources 
and of new community development. 
The case for justification of Government land acquisition for new 
communities 
Only in the sense of preventing the growth of slums, however, is 
the government sponsorship of new communities the kind of action 
which legitimately deals with the issue of blighted land. Moreover, the 
very intent of the proposed statute is to establish communities in 
urbanizing areas of substantial open space, space which is probably 
not blighted under even the most liberal definition of the term. 
Despite the apparent unavailability of the blighted land concept on 
which to sustain the public purpose behind acquisition of land for new 
communities, the case law does indicate an expanding notion of emi- 
nent domain in Massachusetts sufficient to sustain a carefully drawn 
and controlled statute. 
In the first place, where the asserted public purpose has not been 
pinned on the particular kind of land to be taken, the Massachusetts 
courts have stressed only the purpose of the bill and have not rejected 
the taking of open land as per se an invalid public purpose.” For 
example, in the Worcester Housing Authority case,” the Court sus- 
tained the inclusion within a project area of subareas that contained 
neither residential property nor buildings that were ‘“‘substandard”’ or 
“decadent”? within the statutory meaning. 
The declared purposes of the statute would in many cases be thwarted if the 
authority must exclude from the redevelopment every adjacent parcel to which 
considered by itself, the statutory definition may not apply.®8 
The court here did go on to stress the contiguity of the nonconform- 
ing subareas and their proximity to residential buildings; but never- 
theless did verify the taking of clearly unblighted land. 
A second, and related, factor suggesting the validity of eminent 
domain for a public new community development is the emphasis in 
the cases on planning and prevention. On the Federal level, the 
Supreme Court, in sustaining a broad program aimed at eliminating 
existing slums and blighted areas that tend to produce slums, offers 
this functional justification for the taking of unoffending tracts of land: 
If owner after owner were permitted to resist these redevelopment programs on 
the ground that his particular property was not being used: against the public 
interest, integrated plans for redevelpoment would suffer greatly.*° 
In Massachusetts, too, the courts have deferred to some preventive 
legislation. The 1943 high court broadly suggested that even if the evil 
to be avoided is one feared rather than one presently existing, that is 
no reason for denying legislative authority to guard against it.®° 
More recently the court brought together the ideas of planned growth 
and prevention of blight to find a public purpose in the elimination of 
56 Morgan, op. cit., at 23. 
57 335 Mass. 19, 138 N.E. 2d 356 (1956). 
8 bid. at 22, 138 N.B. 2d at 358. 
59 Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 35 (1954). 
60 Commonwealth v. Town of Hudson, 315 Mass. 335, 340, 52 N.E. 2d 566, 570 (1943). 
