Page:United States Reports, Volume 545.djvu/536



Opinion of the Court we upheld the interest in breaking up a land oligopoly that “created artiﬁcial deterrents to the normal functioning of the State’s residential land market,” ; and in Monsanto, we accepted Congress’ purpose of eliminating a “signiﬁcant barrier to entry in the pesticide market,”. It would be incongruous to hold that the City’s interest in the economic beneﬁts to be derived from the development of the Fort Trumbull area has less of a public character than any of those other interests. Clearly, there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose.

Petitioners contend that using eminent domain for economic development impermissibly blurs the boundary between public and private takings. Again, our cases foreclose this objection. Quite simply, the government’s pursuit of a public purpose will often beneﬁt individual private parties. For example, in Midkiff, the forced transfer of property conferred a direct and signiﬁcant beneﬁt on those lessees who were previously unable to purchase their homes. In Monsanto, we recognized that the “most direct beneﬁciaries” of the data-sharing provisions were the subsequent pesticide applicants, but beneﬁting them in this way was necessary to promoting competition in the pesticide market. . The owner of the department store in