The City of Dallas is eying private property and, like a guy with a pocketful of roofies, isn’t going to let a simple “no” stand in its way.

It’s a small rectangle of asphalt 25 feet wide and hardly big enough to squeeze a tractor-trailer on. It sits on Young Street, just west of Lamar Street, and is surrounded on three sides by walls protecting the construction site of the city’s convention center hotel.

The land isn’t needed to build the hotel. But it will be necessary for City Hall’s larger vision of a development complete with shops and restaurants and rail lines.

And even though they’re trying to lawyer their way around state law which prohibits theft of real estate eminent domain for economic development, they’ve already admitted the truth.

But city officials acknowledge the land would help support the hotel project, and there’s little question the hotel project is about economic development.

I thought we’d had enough of this nonsense after Kelo which, as a project, ended about the same way the government-run hotel will, if every case study in history is correct.