Last summer, Marc and Joan Hendel were among the owners of 13 homes Massachusetts planned to seize by eminent domain to make way for the new Sagamore Bridge. Now, most of those homes belong to the state.
By April of this year, Massachusetts had taken 11 of the 13 properties, including the Hendels' newly built Cape Cod home. Public records reviewed by the Boston Globe show that the state had paid at least $4.8 million for six of the homes —more than their combined $3.5 million assessed value. Records for the five others had not yet surfaced.
But for the Hendels, those dollar amounts obscure a yearslong ordeal. In late 2023, the couple decided it was time to move back home to New England after years in the Midwest.
They set their sights on Cape Cod, which is equidistant from Joan’s family in Boston and Marc’s family in Connecticut. It was also close to the ocean, which Marc describes as “our place.”
In the Round Hill neighborhood of Bourne, they found what seemed like a dream: a plot of land and a spec home they could shape into their retirement haven.
But just a month after their March 2025 move-in date, that dream unraveled. A letter was hand-delivered from the state, informing them their brand-new home would be seized by eminent domain to clear space for a new bridge.
The Hendels’ fight exposes a painful reality: When eminent domain collides with a historic housing shortage, “fair compensation” can seem like an illusion—especially for homeowners who know there may be no true replacement for what they’ve lost.
‘We were lost for words’
In December 2023, Marc and Joan purchased a piece of land along with a contract for a spec house. As they were buyers from afar, they trusted their real estate agent to alert them to any red flags. None came.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after they had moved in—and after construction had ended, the boxes were mostly unpacked, and the routines of daily life had just begun—that the first letter arrived. The state was taking their property by eminent domain.
“We were lost for words,” says Joan. “We said nothing. We have an excellent marriage, we communicate well, but that day, not at all. We didn't know what to do.”
Eminent domain grants governments the power to seize private land for public use in exchange for just or reasonable compensation. In practice, that usually means fair market value —the price a buyer would have paid on the open market the day the state made its claim—along with relocation assistance.
Longtime residents of Round Hill have known that their homes may be at risk of being taken by eminent domain. In 2020, the Army Corps of Engineers deemed the current bridges “functionally obsolete,” and the state began a series of public outreach events to “ better understand and engage ” affected communities, dating to at least June 2021.
But the Hendels were still living out of state, and the outreach meetings were hardly national news. Now, the timeline cuts like a scar: a 2023 land purchase and signed contract, 2025 move-in, then almost immediately, a notice of taking.
As a further insult, the Hendels point to disclosure forms the seller had signed, explicitly denying any planned public use for the land. How could nobody have warned them?
MassDOT’s case: ‘People absolutely rely on these bridges’
For state officials, the Hendels’ loss is part of a much larger and unavoidable undertaking. The Sagamore and Bourne bridges are each nearly 90 years old and together carry more than 38 million trips annually. They are the Cape’s only roadway connections to the mainland, serving not just residents and workers but also tourists, emergency vehicles, and hurricane evacuation routes.
“People absolutely rely on these bridges,” says Luisa Paiewonsky , executive director of MassDOT’s Mega Projects Delivery Office, highlighting their importance to the Massachusetts state economy.
The residents of Cape Cod "really are relying on us to deliver replacement bridges, because with 90-year-old spans, [the bridges] are what we call functionally obsolete, meaning they're not serving their intended purpose,” she adds.
Paiewonsky emphasizes that the project team studied multiple alignments and deliberately chose the one with “the fewest residential property impacts.” Still, she concedes that eminent domain comes with unavoidable pain.
“Even though we have very robust processes to make sure people are fully compensated—not only for acquisition of their homes but for all the relocation expenses, and we support helping them find a new home—we still recognize that it goes beyond a simple financial transaction,” she says. “To take someone’s home can be very disruptive and distressing for them. ... We are really working hard to make sure we're treating people with respect and professionalism, and compassion for the disruption that it can cause.”
The loss of a ‘forever home’
For the Hendels, that disruption may prove to be too large a sum to compensate.
They poured their life savings into the land and construction for their new home, and customized the house for their retirement. Joan had been planning on retiring in a year, maybe two. But now, she says, “that’s out of the picture. They’ve ruined our lives.”
Scholars have debated whether monetary compensation can ever truly balance the scales in the case of taking property by eminent domain.
“The courts have long recognized that property has unique value for its owners. Taking property for public purposes imposes costs on property owners such as emotional loss and move-related stress that cannot be quantified and recovered even through full monetary compensation,” as one paper from the free-market think tank Pioneer Institute puts it.
Massachusetts complicates things further by being a “quick take” state. That means the government can assume legal title to a home before final compensation is settled, leaving owners in limbo while they fight for what they believe to be fair.
As another passage in the Pioneer Institute paper argues, “The power of the government to condemn property reduces the holdout and monopoly power that property owners possess when a parcel is needed for a large project.” In other words, speed and certainty for the state come at the expense of homeowners who may never feel truly made whole.
Is just compensation even possible?
At the heart of the Hendels’ fight is a devastating reality: There may be no true equivalent home for the state to offer them.
Recent market data underscores the problem. In July, Barnstable County had just 1,402 active listings with a median price near $946,000, according to Realtor.com® data. Of those homes, only 6.1% were built in 2024 or later, which the Hendels insist is necessary for their replacement.
And when new builds do appear, they command a steep premium: roughly $654 per square foot, compared with $530 for older homes.
“Cape Cod is still in seller's market territory, with a constrained amount of inventory relative to the pace of home sales there,” explains Realtor.com® senior economist Joel Berner. “Buyers do not have many options to choose from, and what is available is very expensive. Homebuying is difficult on Cape Cod, which makes new construction all the more appealing—and all the more disappointing when it does not work out.”
Even if the state could secure them a new build, Marc worries that the “replacement” would come with strings attached.
“What [the state doesn’t] understand,” he says, is “if they get us a house that's bigger than this one now, for the rest of my life, I’m paying more property taxes than we had budgeted for. Who’s going to make that up?”
For retirees or those nearing retirement, like the Hendels, the hidden costs of homeownership loom large: higher utility bills, pricier landscaping, steeper maintenance. Each additional dollar erodes their already fragile retirement plan—and magnifies the sting of losing the home they’ve already poured their life savings into.
“Who's going to pay for all these things that they've never thought of?” Marc asks.
In short: Even if the state offers fair market value, the odds of finding a comparable home—let alone one tailored to their needs—are vanishingly slim.
The broader human impact
The Hendels aren’t alone. In all, 13 homes and three commercial properties will be taken by eminent domain if the state is able to move forward with its plans.
Other affected neighbors include elderly residents and veterans who may be forced to surrender the homes they’ve lived in for decades. Even those not directly displaced will face years of blasting, noise, and heavy machinery in what was once a quiet neighborhood.
The tale of the residents of Round Hill underscores a deeper flaw in eminent domain law: In an era of soaring housing costs, fair market value is often no substitute for a truly comparable home. The result is more than displacement, but delayed retirements and dreams deferred.
