Article from Reason by John Stossel and Maxim Lott.

An apartment developer paid millions for prime real estate in Edgewater, New Jersey, with a beautiful view of Manhattan. Nearly 2,000 apartments would be built. The developer also offered to build public parks, parking, a ferry terminal, and a pier, all at no cost to taxpayers.

But Edgewater’s mayor, Michael McPartland, and city council said: No, you may not build!

The developer says he knows. He filed a lawsuit alleging a “corrupt relationship” between politicians in Edgewater and an established developer, Fred Daibes. The lawsuit claims Daibes was upset because he wanted the property himself. “Daibes even directly threatened Plaintiff’s representatives that they ‘should have come to me in the beginning,'” the lawsuit states. “‘I own and built this town. Now it will be condemned; I am your neighbor on all sides.'”

The lawsuit then lays out alleged corruption: The mayor lives in a Fred Daibes’ apartment building, where he gets a subsidized rent (an accustation the mayor denies).

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons