The real world has over 870,887 people living in San Francisco. The fictional world of Godzilla King of the Monsters showed San Francisco with damaged buildings overgrown with vegetation. The City that survived the 1906 Earthquake did not survive MUTOs, Godzilla, and one nuclear bomb detonating off the Golden Gate Bridge. Did the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, Sausalito, Marin, and possibly other cities, get condemned after Godzilla 2014?
The State of California cannot take private property without just compensation to the property owner. Cal Const, Art. I § 19(a). However, the State can take private property without compensation under its inherent police power if responding to an emergency or remedying environmental contamination that poses a threat to public health and safety. Cal Const, Art. I § 19(c).
Giant monsters and a nuclear explosion should qualify as an “emergency” and “environmental contamination” that poses a public health risk. Basically everyone in Bay Area is at risk for getting radiation poisoning and multiple forms of cancer. That should justify condemning multiple counties around San Francisco Bay, possibly up the California Delta, and farmland in the Central Valley. If the water supply to the southern part of California was contaminated, much of the state could become unlivable without new water sources. The entire State cannot get a Silkwood Shower to wash away the radioactive fallout.
The State’s power to protect the public health in an emergency by destroying property without compensation includes situations “to prevent the spread of conflagration, or the destruction of diseased animals, of rotten fruit, or infected trees where life or health is jeopardized.” Rose v. City of Coalinga, 236 Cal. Rptr. 124, 127-28 (Ct. App. 1987), citing House v. L. A. County Flood Control Dist., 25 Cal.2d 384, 391. This is when the risk of the emergency calls for the needs of the many (public health) to outweigh the needs of the few (private property owners).
If San Francisco was condemned without an emergency and just compensation to the property owners, those owners could have an inverse condemnation claim against the State of California. For example, in a case where a city determined a building was unsafe, declared it a nuisance, and had it destroyed, the court found in favor of the homeowner. The City failed to show the building was an immediate hazard, thus damages were owned to the homeowner. See, Leppo v. City of Petaluma, 20 Cal. App. 3d 711 (1971).
The issue is whether the State could show by a preponderance of the evidence that there was an actual emergency that required the taking of private property. As there were two giant irradiated carcasses in San Francisco (one embedded in a building, the other in San Francisco Bay), fallout from a nuclear explosion mere mile off the coast (that whale watching boat did not get far in under three minutes), the State of California could prove by a preponderance of the evidence that there was an actual emergency threatening the lives of everyone in San Francisco.
The legal reality that the State of California could condemn San Francisco does not mean that the people displaced are without hope. The Federal Government would have to provide assistance to those that lost homes, because it would be political suicide after a nuclear explosion to ignore victims in San Francisco. Whether or not those impacted stay in California, or move to different states, could have significant political ramifications. California could lose Congressional seats. If former Californians moved to states such as Arizona or Texas, those states could experience a shift in their political composition, with Red States turning at least Purple if not Blue.
Does it make sense that San Francisco and Las Vegas would be condemned or abandoned after Godzilla 2014? Yes, the health risk from being Ground Zero would justify the condemnation. The same could be said for Boston after King of the Monsters too…
