Eric Arnold stood in front of his property in Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, shaking in shock and disbelief. The house he had been painstakingly fixing up for months—the house he poured hours of work and thousands of dollars into—was being clawed into a pile of rubble by a backhoe.
The County had secretly labeled Eric’s house an imminent threat to the community due to its supposed state of disrepair. Under the County’s rules, that secret label gave the mayor and his Code Enforcement officers the power to demolish Eric’s house without any semblance of due process or a court proceeding. But Eric’s property was not a threat to the community. He had been lovingly repairing the fixer-upper with an eye toward giving his children and grandchildren a place to settle nearby. While he still had work to do, the yard was neat, the exterior was clean, the house was locked up, and, most importantly, it was in a vastly improved state of repair compared to when he purchased it.
Despite this progress, Eric first learned that his house might be on the chopping block a little over a month before the County demolished it, when a neighbor called him to say someone was placing a dumpster next to his house. Believing that the County made a mistake, Eric convinced the demolition crew to stand down and then rushed to County offices, begging officials to take his house off the demolition list.
Eric did everything he could to save his house, and County officials led him to believe that he had stopped the demolition. Behind the scenes, however, the County secretly sped up the demolition after Eric asked county officials for help. Less than two months after Eric learned about the potential teardown, the County sent a team of armed Code Enforcement officers to make sure that his house was torn down in the early hours of the morning. The code enforcement officers succeeded.
Unfortunately, much of Eric’s story is not unique. The County has leveled more than 800 homes in just over three years using the same secret procedure it used to demolish Eric’s house. But the Constitution doesn’t allow the County to simply destroy property —all property owners are entitled to notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before the government tears down their home. The County has ignored and continues to ignore these constitutional rules.
Eric knew the County was in the wrong, so he teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to sue Macon-Bibb County in state court and protect the rights of all Americans to due process and to ask for help from government officials.
Case Team
Clients
Attorneys
Christie Hebert
Attorney
Dylan Moore
Litigation Fellow
Robert Peccola
Special Counsel for Litigation and Development
Media Resources
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Eric Begins Renovating a Home in Macon-Bibb and Runs Headlong into the County’s “Blight Fight”
In February 2022, Eric—a lifelong carpenter, doting father, and master home renovator—purchased a fixer-upper in Macon with hopes to renovate it and create housing for his children and grandchildren. As soon as he bought the house, Eric began repairing it by hand. In the months that followed, he removed all debris from the property, leveled the yard, painted the house, replaced its front door, and repaired its roof. He also purchased materials for future renovations, like drywall and bathroom flooring, which he stored inside the home. Eric’s house was well on its way to becoming the family homestead he dreamed of.
Eric didn’t know it at the time, but his vision would never come to pass. That’s because the house he purchased was doomed to become another casualty in Macon-Bibb County’s “blight fight.” Mayor Lester Miller kicked off the blight fight initiative in early 2021 by creating a Code Enforcement department and naming J.T. Ricketson as its Director.i Ricketson—hot off the heels of an unsuccessful race for Sheriff—was selected because Mayor Miller believed he could be the County’s blight-busting “bulldog.”ii
Ricketson has lived up to his nickname. Under his direction, Macon-Bibb Code Enforcement has adopted an “aggressive” approach to seizing and destroying property in the name of fighting blight.iii And in the County’s view, mass demolition of properties is the right tool for the job.
Ordinarily, if government officials want to force someone to tear down a building, they have to go to court. There, the property owner can present evidence in their defense, and the judge has the final say over whether a nuisance exists. If the court finds that there’s a nuisance, it can order the property owner to abate it, whether by improvement or demolition, and supervise that process. But Macon-Bibb allows its Code Enforcement department to bypass this system entirely. Instead of proving that a home is a nuisance in court, Code Enforcement has unilateral power to designate a home for destruction and stick the homeowner with the demolition bill.iv
While this system of mayoral demolition is expedient for Code Enforcement, it is also an unmitigated due process disaster. Since Mayor Miller launched the blight fight in 2021, Code Enforcement has torn down more than 790 homes as alleged nuisances per se—all without giving property owners a chance to defend themselves or involving the courts.v Along the way, County officials have celebrated grim demolition milestones—even gifting Mayor Miller a brick from the 700th house the County tore down without due process.vi
When Eric purchased his house in Macon, Code Enforcement had already marked it for demolition. But Eric had no way of knowing this—when he bought the house, the title was clean, there were no liens on the property, and there was no public record of any Code Enforcement action. In other words, the County’s decision to demolish Eric’s property was a secret. That shadowy process gave the County self-proclaimed authority to demolish Eric’s home at any time despite the obvious, substantial repairs he was making.
When Eric Tries to Get His House off the Secret Demolition List, the County Expedites Its Destruction
Eric didn’t find out that Macon-Bibb planned to destroy his home until a demolition crew attempted to install a dumpster on his property on September 25, 2023. From that day until the day his home was torn down, Eric did everything in his power to prevent the demolition. He drove to every County office he could think of—including Planning and Zoning, Building and Fire Safety, Code Enforcement, and the Mayor’s office—to discuss his situation with County employees. He spoke to Code Enforcement Director Ricketson and Assistant Director Rodney Miller multiple times, informing them that he was working on the house and pleading with them not to tear it down. He even paid for unnecessary repair permits. But at every turn, County officials refused to tell Eric why his property was on the County’s secret demolition list or how he could remove it. Worse, yet, they told Eric that he was not allowed to fix up his own house, and he could not even “touch” it.
In one particularly jarring exchange, Eric asked Assistant County Attorney Frank Howard to write a letter instructing Code Enforcement not to tear down his house. After explaining that he wouldn’t interfere in Code Enforcement’s demolition proceedings, Howard threatened to throw Eric in prison for working on his home without a contractor’s license. (Eric did not need a contractor’s license to repair his own house.) And when Eric told Howard he would do whatever was necessary to avoid the demolition, Howard asked him: “What are you going to do—make Macon Black again?”
Despite Eric’s persistent efforts, Macon-Bibb tore down his house in the early hours of November 15, 2023—less than two months after Eric found out that it was slated for demolition. To make matters worse, Eric learned from the owner of the demolition company that Ricketson made the destruction of his home a “high priority” after Eric asked County officials to remove his house from the secret demolition list.
Eric’s house appears to have been singled out for demolition. To reach it, Code Enforcement officers and the demolition crew had to drive past several homes on Eric’s street alone that were in far worse condition than his. Nevertheless, only Eric’s home was destroyed.
The Plaintiff
The Plaintiff is Eric Arnold.
The Defendant
The Defendant is Macon-Bibb County, Georgia.
The Lawsuit
Macon-Bibb County has created an expedited and secret process where it uses the mayor’s power to abate so-called per se nuisances—a power reserved for when the government must address an imminent threat to public health or safety—to demolish houses. Eric is asking the court to declare that this process violates the United States and Georgia Constitutions. Property owners are entitled to advance notice that the County wants to demolish their property and the opportunity to challenge that decision in court. Rather than honor these constitutional guarantees, Macon-Bibb lets the mayor and his Code Enforcement officers act as judge, jury, and executioner over people’s homes.
Eric is also asking the court to declare that County officials retaliated against him by expediting the destruction of his house after he begged them to stop the demolition. If the First Amendment protects anything, it protects the right of citizens to ask their government officials for help free from retaliation.
With this lawsuit, Eric seeks a court order that will prohibit the County from secretly knocking down any more houses without first giving property owners their day in court. He is also asking the court to declare that the County violated his constitutional rights and to order the County to repay him for the house that it destroyed.
The Litigation Team
The lawyers on this case are Institute for Justice Attorneys Rob Peccola and Christie Hebert alongside Litigation Fellow Dylan Moore. IJ first heard Eric’s story when he called his longtime friend Barbara Schwartz, a New Jersey civil-rights attorney, to discuss the County’s destruction of his house. Barbara knew that IJ could help, so she made sure that Eric reached out to us.
About the Institute for Justice
The Institute for Justice is the national law firm for liberty. For decades, IJ has helped property owners fight back against local governments that ignore the Constitution’s clear commands. IJ is currently challenging Memphis’s Environmental Court, a system, like Macon’s, that tears down houses without due process. In Ocean Springs, Mississippi, IJ represents homeowners who were shocked to find that the city baselessly designated their neighborhood—the city’s only historically Black neighborhood—as “blight” or “slum” in secret. And in a suburb of St. Louis, IJ has teamed up with local entrepreneurs to challenge a redevelopment plan that would force them out of business to make room for big-budget private developers.
