Vera Coking’s house at 127 South Columbia Place in Atlantic City became one of the most famous eminent domain fights in the country after a New Jersey state agency tried to condemn it in 1994 so Donald Trump could build a limousine parking lot for his casino next door. Coking refused to sell, fought the condemnation with the Institute for Justice, and won a 1998 New Jersey Superior Court ruling that killed the taking. She kept the three-story boarding house until 2014, when it was sold at auction and demolished.1
The House and the Widow Who Owned It
Vera Coking and her husband bought the property at 127 South Columbia Place in 1961 for $20,000. The three-story clapboard building had 29 rooms, sat a block from the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and operated as a boarding house. Coking raised three children there and ran the place for more than three decades. She spoke six languages. She had no interest in selling.
Her first serious offer came in 1983, when Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione offered $1 million for the property to build a casino on the block. She turned him down. Guccione built a steel superstructure around and partly over her house anyway, never got a gambling license, and left the skeleton standing until Donald Trump bought the surrounding land in 1993 and had the frame torn down. Crews damaged Coking’s home during demolition: a rooftop fire, broken windows, a removed fire escape, and concrete blocks that fell through the roof and destroyed part of the third story.
The Condemnation Attempt
With Guccione’s skeleton gone and the 22-story Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino next door, Trump wanted Coking’s lot for limo parking. Rather than buy it from her, he turned to the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, a New Jersey state agency with eminent domain power.
On May 6, 1994, the CRDA sent Coking a letter valuing her home at $251,250 and giving her 30 days to accept or face a condemnation suit in Superior Court. That was roughly a quarter of what Guccione had offered eleven years earlier. Weeks later, CRDA Executive Director Nicholas Amato followed up with a warning that she could be required to vacate within 90 days.
The Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm that eventually took the case, called the CRDA’s relationship with casino developers a “marriage of convenience.” Under the agency’s practice, it would not condemn a property unless a casino developer wanted it, and it left properties alone when no developer was interested. Critics argued that arrangement effectively delegated government condemnation power to private parties.
The 1998 Ruling That Saved the House
The case moved through the New Jersey courts for several years under the caption Casino Reinvestment Development Authority v. Banin. In March 1995, the Atlantic County Superior Court held that the CRDA lacked authority to condemn the property. The Appellate Division reversed that decision on November 13, 1996, and allowed the condemnation to move forward. In December 1996, the Institute for Justice joined Coking’s local attorney, Glenn Zeitz, to fight the taking.
On July 20, 1998, Judge Williams of the New Jersey Superior Court ruled for Coking and invalidated the condemnation. The court found “insufficient assurances” that the seized properties would actually be used for the stated purpose of a limousine parking lot, noting that nothing explicitly prevented Trump from changing the intended use of the land after acquiring it. Coking, then in her seventies, kept her home. Her line during the fight, “This is my home. This is my castle,” became a rallying phrase for property rights advocates.
What Happened to the House
Coking stayed in the boarding house for years after the ruling, though the building fell into disrepair. By 2011 she had moved to California to be near family. Her grandson, Ed Casey, first listed the property at $5 million and found no buyers.
The house sold at auction on July 31, 2014. Bidding opened at $199,000 and closed at a $530,000 hammer price, which came to $583,000 with a 10 percent commission. AuctionAdvisors ran the sale. The buyer, initially anonymous, was later identified as Carl Icahn’s IEH Investments LLC. Coking was 86.
Crews removed asbestos and demolished the boarding house on November 20, 2014. Icahn announced no specific redevelopment plan for the lot.
The casino next door did not outlast the house by much. Trump Plaza, which opened in 1984, closed in September 2014 as the poorest-performing casino in Atlantic City. Trump had severed ties with the property in 2009 after multiple bankruptcies at his entertainment companies, and Icahn acquired Trump Plaza through bankruptcy proceedings in 2016. On February 17, 2021, the building was brought down with 3,000 sticks of dynamite and collapsed in roughly 20 seconds.
Why the Case Is Still Cited
Coking’s fight became one of the most frequently cited examples of eminent domain abuse in the United States. The facts were unusually stark: a state agency trying to take an elderly widow’s home of more than three decades and transfer it to a billionaire developer for a parking lot, at a price far below what a previous buyer had offered. The Institute for Justice used the case to argue that courts had been too deferential to government claims of public purpose.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London in 2005 that governments could seize private homes for private economic development, New Jersey legislators introduced bills to restrict condemnation, including proposals to bar the taking of legally occupied residential property that met housing codes. Coking’s case featured in those debates.
The case resurfaced politically in 2015 when Trump launched his presidential campaign. The Club for Growth ran Iowa ads attacking his record on eminent domain, saying: “Trump supports eminent domain abuse… He can make millions while we lose our property rights.” David Boaz of the Cato Institute called Trump a “bully” for using government power against Coking, and Dana Berliner of the Institute for Justice called the parking-lot condemnation “absolutely outrageous.”
Trump did not back down. He described Coking’s house as “terrible,” called it an eyesore that had blocked the construction of “beautiful fountains,” and called eminent domain a “necessary evil.” He told Fox News he agreed “100 percent” with the Kelo decision.
The Institute for Justice continued to invoke Coking’s win in later Atlantic City cases. In Casino Reinvestment Development Authority v. Birnbaum, filed in 2014, a state trial court called another CRDA taking a “manifest abuse of the eminent domain power,” and the New Jersey appellate court unanimously affirmed that ruling in 2019.