Or so we thought.

The people who bought our house sold it a year  later for about $100,000 more than they bought it from us for.  Ouch.  We could cry about timing and if we'd only known, but frankly, God blessed us in letting us sell it so quickly so we could move on with our life.  If someone else made more money off it that we could have potentially made, well, that's just sort of life.  

So this article about a county in Virginia going to court over a real-estate purchase struck me as rather offensive.  To boil it down, a county used eminent domain against a prominent land owner in order to secure a needed parcel of land for a Metrorail station and track.  This was in the spring of 2008.  The land was appraised and they paid the owner.  End of story, right?

Well, no.

Since the market crashed shortly after, and real estate prices in general plummeted, the county felt that it had paid too much for the land, and went to court demanding a lower price.  They won, and the former owner of the land has to pay back $5 million dollars.  

No mention is made of how much the legal firms in this case made, but I'm sure it's a hefty amount.

We sold a house in St. Louis in the summer of 2007.  It was clear at that point that the real estate market was tanking, and we were grateful to sell the house when we needed to - even though it ended up costing us a lot in terms of repairs that needed to be made to the house for the sale to go through (repairs that we weren't informed of on the house inspection that *we* received when we bought the place.  How convenient.).  Still, that's the way life goes, right?  We were able to sell the house even though we made far less on it (because of the repairs) than we had hoped to.  

I can't imagine if the owner had come to us a few months later and said that the prices in the area had dropped further, and would we mind paying her back a few thousand dollars to compensate for her poor timing in purchasing the house.  How would you respond?  I'm sure I would be sympathetic, but not to the point of feeling it was prudent, necessary, or moral to refund some of her money.  Just as I would never think to go to the people that bought our home in Arizona and ask them to share some of the money they made off the house because of when we chose to sell it.  

But our government feels that this is not only reasonable behavior for itself, it has the gall to claim that it is taking this action on behalf of constituents.  I wonder how many constituents in that county have lost their homes because they bought them during the height of the market, and lost all their equity when the market crashed?  Are they supposed to applaud the county for doing what they would never be allowed to do themselves?  

Would you be proud of this sort of action?  Maybe I'm not seeing something obvious here.