ARLINGTON, Va.—In 2023, Macon-Bibb County demolished Eric Arnold’s house—tearing down the house that Eric was actively and carefully renovating into rubble and then carting that rubble away—with no court proceeding, no notice, and no financial compensation. That violated Eric’s constitutional rights to notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. To vindicate those rights and others, Eric has teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to sue Macon-Bibb County in state court. 

“Property rights are the bedrock of American society,” said IJ Attorney Christie Hebert. “To arbitrarily destroy Eric’s house without even the courtesy of letting him know is wrong ethically and wrong under the law.” 

There was no reason to demolish Eric’s house. 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. But the county demolished it anyway as part of its aggressive blight fight.  

The demolition of Eric’s house wasn’t a one-off occurrence. Over the past three years, Macon-Bibb County has demolished over 800 houses that it has designated as blighted through a fast-tracked, secret code enforcement process that completely avoids court proceedings and deprives property owners of a meaningful chance to protect their property. In some cases, like Eric’s, the county doesn’t even bother to notify the owners before knocking their house down.  

Eric found this out the hard way. After moving from New Jersey to Georgia to be closer to his family’s roots, he bought a fixer upper in Macon and immediately got to work repairing it. He hoped that, eventually, he could offer the house to one of his children or grandchildren. But Macon-Bibb County took away that hope. 

“To spend all that time and money and sweat and end up with nothing but a bare piece of land, it’s devastating,” said Eric. “What’s worse is that if I try to rebuild or buy another property, I have no guarantee this won’t happen again. It’s just not right.”  

Eric is an accomplished carpenter, home renovator, and entrepreneur who has been renovating property for decades. Eric put those skills to good use fixing up his house in Macon. But, after months of work and thousands of dollars of investment, Eric was shocked to receive a call from a neighbor telling him that a demolition crew was installing a dumpster on his property. When Eric asked one of the crew members what they were doing, he was told that Macon-Bibb County had ordered his house demolished.  

Eric desperately tried talking to county officials over the next two months but to no avail. He pleaded with officials and showed evidence that the property, far from being blighted, had actually been improved through his work and was only getting better. But rather than help Eric, county employees sped up the demolition, eventually sending a team of armed code enforcement officers to ensure a property that was actively being restored was demolished in the name of the blight fight.  

Before the government can take away your life, liberty, or property, it must first give you due process: fair notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Macon-Bibb’s secret, summary process for tearing down homes fails on all accounts—and offers a disturbing forum for potential government retaliation. 

“Macon-Bibb should welcome skilled home renovators like Eric with open arms,” said IJ Attorney Dylan Moore. “Instead, county officials made demolishing Eric’s house ‘high priority’ after Eric asked for help navigating the unconstitutional system that Macon-Bibb created.” 

Together Eric and IJ seek to hold Macon-Bibb accountable for violating Eric’s constitutional rights and stop the county from continuing to destroy property without providing owners with notice and a right to be heard.  

IJ is a national law firm for liberty and a prominent defender of private property rights. For decades, IJ has helped property owners fight back against eminent domain abuse—like in Ocean Springs, Mississippi where IJ represents homeowners who are challenging the city’s baseless, secret classification of their historically Black neighborhood as a “blight” or “slum” so it can take their properties. And, in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, IJ has teamed up with a property owner to stop warrantless, permissionless searches of private land by state law enforcement.  

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To arrange interviews on this subject, journalists may contact Phillip Suderman, IJ’s Communications Project Manager, at [email protected] or (850) 376-4110. More information on the case is available at: https://ij.org/case/georgia-home-demolition/