Legally defined, Eminent Domain is the inherent power of the state to seize a citizen's private property, or rights in private property, without the owner's consent. The property is taken either for government use or by issuance to third parties who will develop it for "public use."
Having been on the "messy end of the stick" in an Eminent Domain seizure of my property by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1973, (see the article on Tocks Island) I have a bias against takings by the Government of private property for "public use".
''The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The U.S. Supreme Court has diluted the meaning of "public use" to such an extent that virtually anything that a local Government declares to be "public use" will be accepted by the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, effectively nullifying anything the President's executive order stated.
A Court Ruling (348 US 26, 32-33 (1954) states that: ''The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive. The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.'' For ''public use,'' then, it may well be that ''public interest'' or ''public welfare'' is the more correct phrase.
Specifically; if you own a single family home on 5 acres that has been in your family for generations, or for that matter, even if you purchased it last year, the local government has the power to steal your land by giving you what is deemed to be "just compensation", and give or sell that property to a developer that will erect 20 new homes on your 5 acres, generating a lot more tax revenue for the local government, which is deemed to be in the "public interest"
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