Susette Kelo lives quietly in a town in southeastern Connecticut, having left New London after the settlement that ended her fight with the city. Her famous little pink cottage was not demolished with the rest of the Fort Trumbull neighborhood; it was taken apart, moved about a mile, and reassembled at 36 Franklin Street in New London, where it still stands as a private residence. The land the city seized from her sat empty for close to twenty years before new apartment construction finally began.
The Pink House at 36 Franklin Street
The Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London gave the city authority to clear the entire Fort Trumbull neighborhood, and most of the houses were in fact demolished. Kelo’s was not. Preservationists led by Avner Gregory negotiated with the city to dismantle the Victorian cottage piece by piece and move it rather than destroy it, with the relocation funded by the city as part of its settlement with the holdout homeowners.
The house sits today at the intersection of Franklin and Cottage Streets in New London. It keeps the pink exterior and the gingerbread trim that made it recognizable during the litigation. It functions as a private home, but for property rights advocates it also carries symbolic weight as the one piece of the old neighborhood that survived the bulldozers.
A 2017 feature film, Little Pink House, dramatized Kelo’s fight and reintroduced the story to audiences more than a decade after the ruling.
What Happened to the Fort Trumbull Land
For most of the time since the decision, the strongest argument against it was simply the empty lots. The redevelopment plan that justified seizing the neighborhood was built around Pfizer’s nearby pharmaceutical research campus, and in 2009 Pfizer announced it was closing that facility and relocating roughly 1,400 jobs out of New London. Without the anchor tenant, no developer could finance the planned hotel and condominiums.
The bulldozed blocks became what locals and journalists called an urban prairie: overgrown lots, weeds, feral cats, no construction. That vacancy lasted close to two decades.1Justia. Kelo v. City of New London
Construction has recently started to change that picture. RJ Development, a New Haven firm, has planned a 251-unit apartment complex on Chelsea Street in the Fort Trumbull area, a second 249-unit building on Walbach Street, and a six-story parking garage. Optimus Construction Management has pitched a 104-unit apartment complex and an extended-stay hotel near the Fort Trumbull Riverwalk. The city also completed a 58,000-square-foot community recreation center in the neighborhood. The transformation took twenty years rather than the few originally promised, and the families displaced in the taking saw none of it.
Kelo’s Life After the Case
After settling with the city, Kelo moved from New London to a home in a nearby town in southeastern Connecticut. She continued working as a registered nurse, taking on multiple jobs to support herself. The nursing career she had before the litigation is the one she kept.
She also became a public figure in a way she had not planned. Property rights organizations invited her to speak, and she has made appearances on significant anniversaries of the ruling, consistently framing what happened in Fort Trumbull as a question about whether ordinary homeowners can feel secure when a better-funded developer wants their land. She has stayed with that message for twenty years, which is part of why the case has not faded into a legal footnote.
The Ruling That Put Her There
The underlying case went to the Supreme Court after Kelo and several neighbors refused to sell to the New London Development Corporation, the private nonprofit the city had empowered to carry out its Fort Trumbull plan. In June 2005, the Court held 5–4 that economic development qualified as a “public use” under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, which provides that private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.”1Justia. Kelo v. City of New London2Congress.gov. Amdt5.10.1 Overview of Takings Clause The city did not need to put the land to direct public use; a plausible argument about broader community benefit was enough.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent warned that the ruling left every home, farm, and small business vulnerable whenever a developer promised more tax revenue, and that the benefits of such takings would flow to large corporations while the costs fell on people with less political influence.3Cornell Law Institute. Kelo v New London – Dissent What played out in Fort Trumbull tracked her warning closely.
The Reform Movement Her Case Started
Public reaction to the ruling was immediate and crossed party lines. Polls at the time showed more than 80 percent of Americans disapproved. Within a few years, more than 40 states passed laws aimed at restricting the use of eminent domain for private economic development, the most widespread state legislative reaction to a Supreme Court decision in American history.
The protections those reforms actually provided varied widely. The Institute for Justice, which represented Kelo at the Supreme Court, has tracked them and found that roughly half of the state laws provided strong protection, while others contained significant loopholes or amounted to little in practice. Several state supreme courts went further, reading their own state constitutions to protect property owners more strongly than the federal floor set by Kelo. The same taking the Supreme Court approved in 2005 would likely be blocked in many states today, even though the federal precedent still stands.
That is where Kelo’s story has landed: she lost her house, kept her nursing career, moved to a neighboring town, and watched her former neighborhood sit empty for two decades before anything was built on it. The pink cottage at 36 Franklin Street is still there.